for Myrobalan

[misdirection_hex]

Loyalist traitors will burn with the Chantry!

Stand for freedom--or fall with the slavers.

The choice is yours.

The flyers line the second-floor corridor, pasted on the door of every double room. The apprentices and enchanters have been spared the propaganda. Vandelin deduces that the culprit isn't allowed up onto the enchanters' floor of the tower, and wouldn't be familiar enough with it to pick out the Loyalists' doors in any case--but he or she knows that the mages are ripe for recruitment. He suspects 'she,' and can hazard more than an educated guess about her name.

He'll be expected to discipline her; she's his apprentice, after all, and he'll be blamed for this little stunt--but he's tempted to leave the flyers as they are, just for a little longer. It's only when he notices that one's already been taken down that he reconsiders. And it's only when he realizes that the door belongs to his cousin that he feels a tiny pang of remorse.

Quietly, he knocks.

Comments

[faithlikeaseed]

There's a murmur from behind the door, a vague verbal mush that might be "it's unlocked" filtered through more than just the single panel of intervening wood. It's followed by the sound of a chair being pushed back and Myrobalan clearing his throat before repeating himself: "Come in. It's unlocked."

He's always been the messier of the pair sharing this particular room, though that's hardly saying much given the obsessive neatness of the workspace across from his. But the level of disorder on his side of the room--an armful of books spilled in a negligent avalanche across the bed, a satchel thrown so hard after them half its contents have spilled out--implies something a little more emotional than a young man's careless entropy at work.

Myr himself is something like composed by the time the door opens, though there's a livid design crushed across one cheekbone precisely matching the embroidery on his sleeves. He's only got eyes for the flyer--torn where it'd been pulled from the door--atop the smear of parchments obscuring the desktop, his expression a kind of haunted disbelief.

No surprise, though. There's nothing surprising about any of this.

[misdirection_hex]

Vandelin takes in the chaos, quiet and unhurried, scanning the room behind Myr as if reading a textbook. Whatever guilt or regret it might inspire, he's not about to display it. The swath of destruction cut across the room in Myr's fury is less foreign of a reaction to pain than Vandelin wishes it were, but he reminds himself that he would never have allowed a roommate to see such proof of heightened emotion.

But perhaps Myr's won't, at that. Once invited in, Vandelin gathers up the strewn books on the bed and stacks them neatly, as much for an excuse to stall as anything else.

"Kind of a blunt weapon, I know," he says, following his cousin's gaze to the offending flyer. It's not the apology he'd been half in the mind for when he'd knocked.

[faithlikeaseed]

There's a thousand things clawing at the back of Myr's tongue to be said--or screamed--and the only one that makes it in the end is a little strangled noise like an aborted laugh. All the rest he swallows as he takes a hand--steady, now, no shaking--from the desk and rubs at the uncomfortable blotch on his face.

It takes him nearly a minute of that and focused, mindful breathing before he can even begin to match Vandelin's casual tone: "Yeah. What's the sharp one?"

He doesn't look up from the hateful little piece of paper and its condemnation. Simply sets his hand back down and breathes, breathes, trying for the steady rhythm of meditation and sending up a prayer for calm with each exhalation. Wherever his cousin's sympathies might lie, it does Myr no good to take out his fury on Van.

And it would still feel too much like friendly fire besides.

[misdirection_hex]

If he just keeps quietly tidying the room while Myr collects himself, he doesn't have to think about the fact that Myr wouldn't need to be forcibly stopping himself from shaking if it weren't for Vandelin's wayward apprentices and the politics he's encouraged in them.

He lets himself think a little more extensively about the fact that Myrobalan wouldn't be so distressed by the threats if they didn't apply to him, indulges in a private what does he expect? and a he's making his own bed--entirely in a figurative sense, as Vandelin smooths out the blanket and tucks in a corner.

"I'm still working that out," he says. Because the blunt weapons aren't working, and if only he had a sharper one, then perhaps he wouldn't have to see the face of someone he cares about all crumpled and flushed as if actually hit with a closed fist. A sharper weapon wouldn't have to hurt so badly. It doesn't occur to him that perhaps he shouldn't be wielding one against his own flesh and blood at all.

"I'll have a word with the younger ones. This...obviously isn't helping anything." He gestures at the paper, the first tentative admission of fault he can bring himself to manage.

[faithlikeaseed]

The usual tricks aren't working. Easy as it's been in the past for Myr to swallow the hurt and fury that well up in his breast at this kind of--provocation, this blow struck against the framework of his entire life, he can't do it now. Because this time it's so brazen, the line drawn so clearly down the center of his Circle with half of what he loves on one side and half on the other.

Because this time it's Vandelin admitting that where the hammer wouldn't serve he'd be glad to drive the knife between his cousin's ribs, as if a blow delivered in so mannerly a fashion was any less of a deathstroke. It isn't that the message itself is wrong, oh no; it's the presentation that requires an apology. There's no negotiating with the Chantry's ultimate fate, only how much sugar they'd use to cover the taste of the poison.

Myr tears his eyes away from the flyer at last, pushing to his feet and rounding on the other man with black vitriol behind his teeth--

--and stops himself before he can even begin his diatribe, as he takes in the transformation Van's made of the mess he left. He swallows, hard, the band around his chest loosening; where prayers and meditation availed him nothing, it's this--this simple act of kindness that undoes that knot of rage and halts the downward spiral of his thoughts. It's a long, long moment he stands there staring--a little stupidly--before he can find the right words to replace the bitter ones he's lost.

"Thank you."

However wrong Vandelin might be, whatever sedition and heresy he and his apprentices might be spreading, he's acting out of sincere concern. All Myr's anger won't prevail against that; only patience, only reason, no matter how much he still hurts.

"'Not helping anything' is a pretty way to put it," he continues, mustering something like a smile. He reaches back to pluck the flyer off his desk, folding it carefully in quarters, eyes trained on his cousin the while.

"What are you--sorry, they--even hoping they'll accomplish with this?"

[misdirection_hex]

Someone else might flinch when rounded-on. Vandelin doesn't. There's a part of him that's expected it, part of him that's even been courting it, because the calmer you can stay in relation to your opponent, the stronger your ground--

That doesn't work with Myrobalan; it never has. If Van were so coldly detached as to provoke Myr into vulnerability just to gain the upper hand, he wouldn't feel compelled to clean up the room out of some projected worry that Myr's roommate--a man Vandelin only knows by name, nothing about his character--might take advantage of his emotional weakness in the same way. It's always been the way of things. He might have quit the Chant-discussion group in a fit of agnostic righteousness after a few months, but he'd still surreptitiously charged all of Adalbert Maynard's robes with incurable static cling for talking shit about it.

"I didn't set them to it," he says, a moment's defensiveness that he allows himself only after lowering his guard a little. "I don't blame them for strength of conviction, but you can't enlighten anyone by setting them on fire."

[faithlikeaseed]

He spreads his hands in mute acquiescence to Vandelin's correction; it was a slip of the tongue, no more, that lumped the master in with his fumbling apprentices. Myr knows his cousin's more subtle than that--and he spares himself a breath to deal with the twinge of pain that causes.

Then he can smile, with some wry conviction behind it. "You get the feeling they'd sign up for an all-mage March if you told them it was pointed at Val Royeaux," he observes. "Wind them up and there they go, off to take the Divine to account."

His fingers work as he talks, folding and unfolding, turning the flyer into a gestating mass of creased paper. The motion helps keep him a little apart from what he's saying, treating it as the kind of academic exercise they've argued before without any personal acrimony. Pray the Maker he can keep it like that now and use the tools of rational discourse to prise loose some fragment of intent or doubt or gentle sentiment he can play on to... To...

Bringing Van back to the fold is likely impossible, barring a miracle, but damned if Myr won't try.

"But, so. They've botched this one. What would you have posted up on all our doors to turn us to your cause?"

[misdirection_hex]

Vandelin knows rhetoric when he hears it. He has to admire all those subtle little jabs, dog whistles enough to put a Fereldan to shame. So much for the grand freedom fighters, trooping off like mindless little toys to crush the Andrastians like they once ground our people beneath their holy boots; here comes the new boss, same as the old; your cause is no less a religion than our prayer.

He gazes down at the intricate folds of paper in Myrobalan's hands, watching the holy symbol take shape from the fiery declaration of antitheism, and lets out a little huff of laughter. Not so subtle after all, perhaps.

"You think I'd resort to flyers on doors?" he says, with a faint note of genuine amusement--it could have been a joke between them, in happier times. You know me well. He considers it--has considered it, but makes a show of it now, as if willing to engage on Myr's terms.

"The atrocities of the templars in places like Kirkwall and Tantervale would speak for themselves if only we all had a way to hear them. But we don't, do we? When the only news we're ever permitted is what we get from those with the freedom to leave the tower, well." He spreads his hands wide. "You can't give a regime enough rope to hang itself if they're allowed to hide the rope. We need to drag everything into the daylight. There's only so much we enchanters can do at once when they deign to let us out."

[faithlikeaseed]

"Truly, no," Myr admits, finishing the Maker's band with a final twist and tucking the ends together to form it into a single unbroken curve. He considers for a moment offering it to Vandelin, then discards that idea; too likely, his cousin would take it as a declaration of open war between them, however Myr means it. Instead, he sets it down behind him on his desk, giving it a little push toward a haphazard stack of its fellows in various sizes. He's had a lot of cause to make them, these days. "You prefer evidence to slogans."

Which see. Myr folds his arms across his chest, a defensive huddle all unintended, and listens to what his cousin has to say without interrupting--though he flinches around the eyes at the mention of Kirkwall. (How long had he spent on his knees begging that the rot exposed there did not reach to the Chantry's heart? That retaliation for the abomination unleashed there would not rest so heavy on the innocent? At least there'd been a prayer answered when outside forces had foiled the Annulment.)

Quietly, then--because it's the only way he can hope to keep his voice even--he says, "But we've heard of Kirkwall and Tantervale here. It isn't--" ...He can't do this. He had thought, in that one moment of calm he'd been gifted, that he had reserves sufficient to meet this challenge with the equanimity and compassion it required. But the fragile clarity he had is slipping away by the second and he feels trapped here in what should be his sanctum and Maker love him all Van will do is make this worse--

Breathe in, breathe out. Myr presses one fisted hand to his lips, eyes briefly closed as he packs away the doubt, the worry, the pain. Then he resumes, evenly as you please, "--a matter of information now, is it, as what we do with what we've been told. You don't need to persuade me that there are wicked men and women among the templars, that they need to be dealt with.

"Persuade me that destroying the Chantry root to crown is the only way to get rid of them."

It's not any different in its way than his combat training, pushing past the limits of his own endurance. But it hurts, and there's no swordmaster around to tell him whether or not it's the sort of pain that's to be expected with growth, or the kind that cripples and kills.