I can tell you from experience that breaking wine bottles is generally done with a message in mind. Yet the bottle was broken after the first message, which was pristine. Scented.
You were trying to tell me something both times, and you have changed your fickle mind. Why?
[He can guess, but he wants to hear Astarion say it, so he can rebuff the pity.]
I didn’t change my mind so much as— all right, fine. Yes. There’s more to it than that, but you’re not missing much in the general play-by-play, I swear.
It’s true. The cards were a gift. The letter, too. A little gesture of appreciation for watching my back ever since we first stumbled over one another in the dark, and not just figuratively speaking.
Not many people would. There’s usually a great deal more bartering and seduction involved.
[And it never ended well for them. Not with Cazador involved.]
And you won’t even let me touch you, so. Can’t be that.
[He isn’t saying it as though he’s offended. He isn’t saying it like much of anything, in fact. That’s just the truth of it all, he’s decided.]
Anyway the cards are marked. I spent a little while etching out a system of notches that can be felt if you’re of a mind to spare yourself the embarrassment of trying and failing at gambling against swindlers. I’d planned on breaking it in with a beautifully high-blooded bottle of wine at a preappointed time just after sunset, and—
[—he’s laughing suddenly, one hand pressed ruefully across his eyes. Hells.]
It was such an expensive bottle of wine, too. Damn—
I’ve set my own bloody housing fund back by at least a month for nothing but my own temper.
[Nothing. Nothing at all to show for it now. Nothing even to have enjoyed.]
You absolutely will not. [He counters, paper-sharp.] For two hundred years I’ve been squatting in miserable squalor at someone else’s mercy, on someone else’s grounds. I’m done.
[For all his well-worn flaws, he's a very proud creature at heart.]
I don't need a donation. Certainly not from the man I've already made clean up my own mess.
[Well, it's his freedom to use or squander. Fenris folds up the note, hiding it in a cubby-hole behind a shelf he's begin to use to store items of value. At the appointed time, Fenris is present. He has his own bottle of wine, and sets it down with an uncompromising clink between them.]
[If he was dealing with someone else, he might imagine the mage tower hall empty: petty revenge for petty slights— a little eye for an eye treatment— and nothing Astarion would hold against them. There’s something to be said for making a statement when things go awry.
But it’s Fenris, so he knows exactly what he’s dealing with, right down to the bottle of wine set down on the table, prompting a mild scoff (and an even milder shake of his head) just before his own smile twists just slightly.]
Fenris doesn't answer, only sits across from Astarion and shuffles the deck in a way that suggests he is not only well-acquainted with card games, but participating in them while wearing sharp gauntlets. The cards do not come out scratched.
He begins laying out the deck for Diamondback, giving Astarion his hand of twelve cards face down.
It’s a fascinating thing to watch. So much so, in fact, that Astarion doesn’t bother nagging at Fenris for attention or conversation, pleased to see the perpetuity of skill in play.
This should be interesting.
After all, he’d nicked the cards to make them readable by touch, but he’s not the one holding the deck— and at a distance there’s not much he can do to influence a deck with such unique markings: he can’t slip a general card into the mix, he can’t easily pocket one unnoticed.
Good. That means he’ll play the cheat in this game. The tavern ghost looking for easy coin. With Fenris, of course, starring as himself.
“Do you like them, at least?” He asks, rearranging his hand to sort out wheat and chaff respectively.
Fenris' lip twitches, the echo of a smile. "I hope you stole them from someone terrible."
He lays six cards out between them both, aside from the deck. "We have to match cards to suit or number, our points doubling the longer the branches grow. But you can't add a low value card to a high value branch."
It's a waiting game, a game of hoping your opponent doesn't have the cards you need to make your branches.
“They’re from Hightown, darling.” chuckled smoothly at Fenris’ own bout of cleverness, content to play along without spoiling the fun.
He likes that. The strange, almost imperceptible streak of mischief that lives beneath an otherwise dour surface. Good for him, living a little. No beautiful creature deserves to be suffocated by rigidity.
“Everyone’s terrible there.”
His tone goes soft, then. Delicate as spun sugar, and entirely free of anything but rarer congeniality. He thumbs through his hand, plucking up the makings of a branch addition, laying it down gently enough to let the card snap softly when it meets the table.
"I know," Fenris says, the grin catching, "I used to live there, remember?"
He sits and spreads his hand in a fan, studying the cards and the slight nicks the the side, slowly memorizing the trick hand as Astarion intended it. He sips wine with the other hand, doing so as Astarion has taught him.
"This is Rivaini. I think you'd like it there, aside from the Qun to the north. It has a more ...fruity flavor." Fenris doesn't really know how one talks about wine, but that's someone else's problem. He'll enjoy what he likes.
“Then that makes twice now that I’ve taken something lovely from those gilded streets.”
There’s an edge to it— as there’s an edge to everything Astarion says, even when it’s well-hidden— but it’s mild in truth. All soft-bellied, playful, even. He isn’t putting Fenris on the spot.
No, he’s just being himself.
The cup at his side is lifted with new focus at Fenris’ commentary, however, carefully held and carefully measured in its presence when he drinks, seemingly unbothered by his conversational partner’s rudimentary description. In fact, Astarion even passes for considerate, as though the elf seated across from him might be a sommelier of sorts.
“Quite the communal sort, I’ve read. Elevating one another in profit, decadent in fashion and yet not so ruled by it that they pass along judgment over it. Heretical for not believing in the Maker— but hold decent standing regardless, and love to see a woman on top.” His smile twists, he watches those clawed gauntlets study and shift cards, content to be patient for a move.
“You’re right. I think we’d be remarkably compatible.”
Fenris rolls his eyes, but it's without any real pique. This is just how Astarion is. Now that Fenris knows it, he doesn't really mind. The man likes to talk flashy nonsense. Why not let him?
Fenris thinks, with practice, he'll be able more and more to hear the parts that are true.
"Rivain and Antiva, then. If this war ends well and you are not sent back... wherever, I would suggest investigating."
Fenris deals two cards, two branches, starting low.
“Mhm. I won’t be going back, you can be sure of that.” A promise to himself more than anything conversational, and it shows in the harsher set of his own brow. Still, instead of dwelling, he merely busies himself with plucking up one card to match, and subsequently drawing as he needs— careful to take two cards, rather than one.
A discreet deception.
“But what about you?” Asked on the heels of it, and not just to mask his own thieving sleight of hand.
“What will you do, I wonder, once you’re no longer tethered to tirelessly waging war?”
Fenris misses the double draw. He's been in the company of better cheats, and always came away confused. "When the Venatori are disbanded? I suppose I shall see what new form slavery takes."
And destroy as much of it as he can. He sips his wine calmly, the thought a stable, warming one.
There’s a flatness threaded throughout that question, something not bordering on pleasant, but faintly masked all the same. Perhaps, if Fenris considers it keenly, he’ll see it for what it really is.
Jealousy.
After all, while Astarion is certain all those despairing, anguished souls will be eternally grateful to the hero that stumbled in (or will stumble in yet) to their varying rescues, shining in all tattooed glory— no one ever rescued him, did they?
No, that pretty little fairy tale was never his to have, and he can’t quite manage to pretend he isn’t bitter over it now.
“Nothing for yourself? No formal retirement plans?”
Fenris thinks of the vast futures of people he has known, with ambitions for themselves beyond the boundaries of poor fate and little promise. What is he, then? An investment in a refused future. He will pay it back as bitterly as he is able.
It’s written across his features without so much as a note of deception in play, though maybe not for lack of trying. Not to be mistaken for anything sharper, something like anger or outrage— his discouragement is mild, and he won’t go dragging Fenris into deeper discussions about his own feelings while they're snapping down cards over sunken wood.
“I can’t understand it, I suppose. You were a slave, you know what it’s like. Stuck living your life entirely under someone else’s control. Their whims, whatever they might be.” His jaw is unusually tight in fainter measures, he feels up to his ankles in a subject he never meant to broach. But they’re here now, and he’ll shift his hand if necessary. Cut a different course.
“Don’t you want to live for yourself for a change?”
Fenris doesn't, ultimately, care what Astarion think of his personal choices, which is why they interest him. It is nice, he thinks, to have someone to discuss things with when they do not fall into some squirming political strata, when they are idle, unimportant.
Yet Astarion's question cuts right through Fenris. He's reminded of Isabela, but Isabela would grow bored of directness and change the subject, not wanting to have a 'boring' argument. Astarion shoots right through, heedless.
It shouldn't really be a surprise, but it is. Fenris blurts out, "I don't know how."
“Well shit.” Soft-spoken, blunt as the day is long.
In that sense, maybe they’ve both been taken by surprise.
He focuses instead on the game after a glum look briefly works its way across his sharp features, fanning the stolen card to study it with discretion, and betting the temporary depth of conversational field won’t prompt any card counting on Fenris’ part. At least then it’ll be worth it. He moves to the first branch, raising the height of its value. He can afford to play a little harder.
“I can’t promise to help. It’s hard enough finding my own footing here.” Between the anchor shard, the lack of allies, the war, his own selfish need to play everything safe and to his advantage. A laundry list of troubles, and all of them better than what he’d left behind. “But later, if there’s time. I could always impart a pearl or two of wisdom here or there. Something to get the ball rolling, so to speak.”
“You’re not half so grim as you look, after all. It’d be a pity to waste it.”
Fenris chooses to take this time to brood over it. Why was he so open? Why was he so caught off guard? And the truth of it is, he does not guard himself around Astarion. For all the flashing of teeth, the man is harmless to Fenris.
Still, he has to express skepticism at Astarion's offer. "I already know how to have casual sex and eat expensive food."
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He opts to cast his voice differently, letting mildness claim it rather than tension. Something a note more earnest. Nature is healing, etc.]
Why wouldn’t it make sense?
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You were trying to tell me something both times, and you have changed your fickle mind. Why?
[He can guess, but he wants to hear Astarion say it, so he can rebuff the pity.]
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It’s true. The cards were a gift. The letter, too. A little gesture of appreciation for watching my back ever since we first stumbled over one another in the dark, and not just figuratively speaking.
Not many people would. There’s usually a great deal more bartering and seduction involved.
[And it never ended well for them. Not with Cazador involved.]
And you won’t even let me touch you, so. Can’t be that.
[He isn’t saying it as though he’s offended. He isn’t saying it like much of anything, in fact. That’s just the truth of it all, he’s decided.]
Anyway the cards are marked. I spent a little while etching out a system of notches that can be felt if you’re of a mind to spare yourself the embarrassment of trying and failing at gambling against swindlers. I’d planned on breaking it in with a beautifully high-blooded bottle of wine at a preappointed time just after sunset, and—
[—he’s laughing suddenly, one hand pressed ruefully across his eyes. Hells.]
It was such an expensive bottle of wine, too. Damn—
I’ve set my own bloody housing fund back by at least a month for nothing but my own temper.
[Nothing. Nothing at all to show for it now. Nothing even to have enjoyed.]
How embarrassing.
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I will pay back what you have spent. When are we going to play?
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[For all his well-worn flaws, he's a very proud creature at heart.]
I don't need a donation. Certainly not from the man I've already made clean up my own mess.
[And then he inhales once. Resetting.]
Tomorrow, then. Sunset, without wine this time.
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But it’s Fenris, so he knows exactly what he’s dealing with, right down to the bottle of wine set down on the table, prompting a mild scoff (and an even milder shake of his head) just before his own smile twists just slightly.]
Tell me you stole this from someone terrible.
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I stole this from someone terrible.
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[Said utterly knowingly, already moving to uncork it: two goblets set between them in short order.]
Have you had a chance to use them yet? The cards, I mean. Get acquainted with their subtleties and whatnot.
[He pinches two fingers against his thumb as he drinks, making the rough shape of a playing card’s edge.]
Or should we just shuffle and put that to the test?
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He begins laying out the deck for Diamondback, giving Astarion his hand of twelve cards face down.
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This should be interesting.
After all, he’d nicked the cards to make them readable by touch, but he’s not the one holding the deck— and at a distance there’s not much he can do to influence a deck with such unique markings: he can’t slip a general card into the mix, he can’t easily pocket one unnoticed.
Good. That means he’ll play the cheat in this game. The tavern ghost looking for easy coin. With Fenris, of course, starring as himself.
“Do you like them, at least?” He asks, rearranging his hand to sort out wheat and chaff respectively.
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He lays six cards out between them both, aside from the deck. "We have to match cards to suit or number, our points doubling the longer the branches grow. But you can't add a low value card to a high value branch."
It's a waiting game, a game of hoping your opponent doesn't have the cards you need to make your branches.
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He likes that. The strange, almost imperceptible streak of mischief that lives beneath an otherwise dour surface. Good for him, living a little. No beautiful creature deserves to be suffocated by rigidity.
“Everyone’s terrible there.”
His tone goes soft, then. Delicate as spun sugar, and entirely free of anything but rarer congeniality. He thumbs through his hand, plucking up the makings of a branch addition, laying it down gently enough to let the card snap softly when it meets the table.
“Drink, or I’ll be offended.”
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He sits and spreads his hand in a fan, studying the cards and the slight nicks the the side, slowly memorizing the trick hand as Astarion intended it. He sips wine with the other hand, doing so as Astarion has taught him.
"This is Rivaini. I think you'd like it there, aside from the Qun to the north. It has a more ...fruity flavor." Fenris doesn't really know how one talks about wine, but that's someone else's problem. He'll enjoy what he likes.
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There’s an edge to it— as there’s an edge to everything Astarion says, even when it’s well-hidden— but it’s mild in truth. All soft-bellied, playful, even. He isn’t putting Fenris on the spot.
No, he’s just being himself.
The cup at his side is lifted with new focus at Fenris’ commentary, however, carefully held and carefully measured in its presence when he drinks, seemingly unbothered by his conversational partner’s rudimentary description. In fact, Astarion even passes for considerate, as though the elf seated across from him might be a sommelier of sorts.
“Quite the communal sort, I’ve read. Elevating one another in profit, decadent in fashion and yet not so ruled by it that they pass along judgment over it. Heretical for not believing in the Maker— but hold decent standing regardless, and love to see a woman on top.” His smile twists, he watches those clawed gauntlets study and shift cards, content to be patient for a move.
“You’re right. I think we’d be remarkably compatible.”
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Fenris thinks, with practice, he'll be able more and more to hear the parts that are true.
"Rivain and Antiva, then. If this war ends well and you are not sent back... wherever, I would suggest investigating."
Fenris deals two cards, two branches, starting low.
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A discreet deception.
“But what about you?” Asked on the heels of it, and not just to mask his own thieving sleight of hand.
“What will you do, I wonder, once you’re no longer tethered to tirelessly waging war?”
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And destroy as much of it as he can. He sips his wine calmly, the thought a stable, warming one.
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There’s a flatness threaded throughout that question, something not bordering on pleasant, but faintly masked all the same. Perhaps, if Fenris considers it keenly, he’ll see it for what it really is.
Jealousy.
After all, while Astarion is certain all those despairing, anguished souls will be eternally grateful to the hero that stumbled in (or will stumble in yet) to their varying rescues, shining in all tattooed glory— no one ever rescued him, did they?
No, that pretty little fairy tale was never his to have, and he can’t quite manage to pretend he isn’t bitter over it now.
“Nothing for yourself? No formal retirement plans?”
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"You disapprove?"
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It’s written across his features without so much as a note of deception in play, though maybe not for lack of trying. Not to be mistaken for anything sharper, something like anger or outrage— his discouragement is mild, and he won’t go dragging Fenris into deeper discussions about his own feelings while they're snapping down cards over sunken wood.
“I can’t understand it, I suppose. You were a slave, you know what it’s like. Stuck living your life entirely under someone else’s control. Their whims, whatever they might be.” His jaw is unusually tight in fainter measures, he feels up to his ankles in a subject he never meant to broach. But they’re here now, and he’ll shift his hand if necessary. Cut a different course.
“Don’t you want to live for yourself for a change?”
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Yet Astarion's question cuts right through Fenris. He's reminded of Isabela, but Isabela would grow bored of directness and change the subject, not wanting to have a 'boring' argument. Astarion shoots right through, heedless.
It shouldn't really be a surprise, but it is. Fenris blurts out, "I don't know how."
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In that sense, maybe they’ve both been taken by surprise.
He focuses instead on the game after a glum look briefly works its way across his sharp features, fanning the stolen card to study it with discretion, and betting the temporary depth of conversational field won’t prompt any card counting on Fenris’ part. At least then it’ll be worth it. He moves to the first branch, raising the height of its value. He can afford to play a little harder.
“I can’t promise to help. It’s hard enough finding my own footing here.” Between the anchor shard, the lack of allies, the war, his own selfish need to play everything safe and to his advantage. A laundry list of troubles, and all of them better than what he’d left behind. “But later, if there’s time. I could always impart a pearl or two of wisdom here or there. Something to get the ball rolling, so to speak.”
“You’re not half so grim as you look, after all. It’d be a pity to waste it.”
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Still, he has to express skepticism at Astarion's offer. "I already know how to have casual sex and eat expensive food."
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