here comes your man (open, intro post)

[birdhousesoul]

((I have decided to elide the inevitable "I'm on a space station? What's that? Why is T-Pain here, and why am I wearing this nautical-themed pashmina afghan?" sequence.

Scenario I/II is a set piece. Scenarios III and IV invite response, if anyone feels so moved!))

I. A pod begins to shake

Comments

[try_winging_it]

Hawke had wondered, though she wouldn't admit to it, what it'd be like if Anders ever showed up on the station. Of course the idea occured to her. Zevran was here, after all, and if he could be, so could others; she hadn't thought it would ever really happen, but who could help wondering what it'd be like if it did? A thousand scenes, ranging from the impossible, stupidly romantic ones (it was her mind, damn it, she was allowed some unrealistic fantasizing) to the shouting and blame-flinging matches that seemed much more likely. Endless conversations rehearsed. And yes, she'd thought of the stunned speechless possibility too, how the ice might be broken, or how it perhaps wouldn't be.

But she hadn't run the full gamut after all, it seemed, because she hadn't imagined running into him happy. When was Anders last happy? Can she even remember? He's clearly been laughing, joking, as though none of it had happened, no driving tension making him half or more than half-mad, no starting a war that would tear the world they'd known apart, no using her to do it, no sitting on a box waiting to see if she'd stab him in the back and put him out of his misery. Instead he looks like he did years ago when they first met. The coat's still black, but otherwise...scruffy, teasing Anders. He's so familiar it hurts, and Hawke, usually easy with words, quick to fire off a quip or teasing remark, or something else more appropriate to a situation, can not find a word.

[Teo looks at Magic Man. Then back at Master, who's even more still than he just was. Then back at Magic Man.

He gives the canine equivalent of a shrug. Magic Man doesn't currently smell like fire or smoke or death. He doesn't smell like the Angry One either. He smells like himself. That's enough for Teo, who trots over and lifts up his head, clearly expecting a pat or ear-rub. His tail thumps the floor, once. Magic Man might prefer cats, but they'd gotten along well enough, once upon a time]

[birdhousesoul]

Anders gives a short laugh that's more like a hiccup, or maybe a bark. He kneels right there on the sticky floor, which puts him just about eye-to-eye with the hulking mabari, and takes the great face between both hands.

"You great big lump of a thing, you." There's a way that Teo likes his ears rubbed at the base, both ears at a time, one to each of the human's hands, and Anders isn't thinking about it too hard but his hands remember just how to do it. "Keeping her safe, are you? Good. Good mabari."

Are his eyes wet? It's kind of dim in here. There may be a gleam at the lower lid.

[try_winging_it]

[Teo thumps his tail on the floor again. Magic Man always was smart, he knows Teo has an important job to do. And he's good with his hands, even Leather Man hasn't quite figured out the ear trick so well, though he gets close. But then, Magic Man had years of practice. Teo licks his face, which is a sign of special favor; not many other than Master get that treatment, and even the few who do only rarely. But Magic Man is from Home, and Teo misses Home, so he's even more glad to see Magic Man than he would be anyway, so there's a lick]

That draws Hawke forward; slowly, stiffly, but forward. She keeps her eyes on Teo rather than Anders, and her throat feels dry as a desert when she speaks. "More like causing mischief wherever he goes. You know his sense of humor."

[birdhousesoul]

"Mischief, nothing. He's a good mabari," insists Anders, who wants desperately to say something light and witty, and just cannot. Just can't go there, not now, not with her.

She should have killed him.

He looks up at her, then, over Teo's head. He has to look, unflinching, steady, because he owes her that much. He can't hide behind the dog any longer, even if Teo is large enough to make that a viable option.

"It's good to see you." It's a paltry offering. He knows it. But it's true, it is good to see her, the way it's good to have rain after months of drought, the way it's good to see sunlight after weeks in the Deep Roads, and some of that truth has to be evident in the words.

And because of that, he bites back the self-abnegating impulse to offer an immediate departure, to remove himself from her sight. If she wants him gone, she'll say so. Hawke's never been shy.

[try_winging_it]

Hawke snorts a little. "Tell that to the local merchants he steals from, or the engineers who get to clean up after he's ripped apart some of their circuitry. As if this place isn't ragged enough as it is." She moves her hand just a little, hard to see, but Teo immediately moves back to sit at her feet. She reaches down and scratches the top of his head, grounding herself, and doesn't meet Anders' gaze. She can hear the depth of emotion behind the simple sentence, and it echoes inside her, but responding to it is more than she can manage just yet. Small talk, she seems to be able to do. One minute at a time. "How long have you been here?"

[birdhousesoul]

Anders rises, bracing his hands against his knees as leverage to do so, feeling old and unsteady. It's the brickquer, he's sure.

"I couldn't say exactly. A few days, maybe a week? I ... did a lot of sleeping." His eyes narrow fractionally as he studies her face, trying to gauge the weight of her question. "That makes it about ten days since we took down the Templars. I'd say we earned some beauty sleep." There, he's managed a bit of humor. Shaky, and fairly unconvincing, and somewhat tart, but it's humor. "Judging from the mirror I still need another month." Of beauty sleep, that is. Ha. Ha.

[try_winging_it]

That gets a reaction, a narrowing of eyebrows. "Ten days?" she repeats, clearly perplexed and ignoring the rest of what he says as she focuses on this bit of confusion. "I've been here for months. Five months, by our calendar." Well, why not? It's not as though anything else about how they were dragged here makes sense. She closes her eyes briefly. "It's really only been ten days for you?" And he was there for a few days after she left, from the sound of it, to see more of the aftermath. Almost, she asks about it. Almost. Five months of beauty sleep definitely hasn't been enough for her.

Beauty sleep. Hawke finally glances at him, then away almost at once, then back, clearly forcing herself to look at him without flinching. But her voice is steady enough as she says, "What you need is a bath and a shave, from the look of you. Not that that's anything new. Don't tell me you've been sleeping with the hippies."

[birdhousesoul]

"Where else is there to sleep?" He's honestly surprised to hear there may be any alternative. He hasn't been offered one. "I mean, I'm not sleeping with them," Anders hastens to clarify, "just sleeping." He scrubs at his face with his knuckles where Teo gave him a tongueswipe. Apparently even the mabari thinks he needs a bath. Really, he's had some sponge baths! It's just the laundry situation he can't seem to pin down ... "Orders taken, serah. A bath and a shave, posthaste." A little teasing, a little rueful. Easier to fall into the old pattern than to make himself think about the way she's looking at him. Easier to pretend it's because he's rough on the eye.

"I ... don't understand how it can be months for you here. Time dilation is this sort of batshit theory that only a few really specialized enchanters ever bother thinking about, and that's only when they get too old to seek any other form of enjoyment in life. It's almost all theory, no one's ever actually done anything with it beyond the application of haste on the battlefield, which lasts what, a few minutes?" He shakes his head. "Maybe I just slept far, far longer than I thought?" But he knows that's wishful thinking.

[try_winging_it]

For a moment, Hawke's voice takes on the dry sarcastic air he should remember. "We were kidnapped across space and time by Maker-knows-what to live on a vessel that by our standards is impossible. Batshit theories are the order of the day here. You can get them at the bar with a side of...well, some protein-based substance that tastes like chalk, but you get the drift."

She sighs and rubs a hand back through her hair, one of the gestures she does when she's very tired, or trying to think of what to do in a tricky situation. "There's rooms of a sort. They're small, space just for a bed and maybe a small table, plus a cubicle for a bathroom. But, privacy and your own space and all that. Probably better places on-board somewhere, but I hadn't bothered to look. So if you'd rather that, I know there's a number of empty ones available at the moment. Up to you." Staying with the hippies is still a step up from the Darktown clinic, after all. "I'm not kind enough to loan you one of my daggers to shave with, though. There, you're on your own."

[birdhousesoul]

An odd look crosses his face, the corner of his mouth twitching upward. "Ah, so that's what - I thought it was a broom closet when she -" He coughs. "Well. I haven't had the grand tour, you might say, just whatever these fine people feel like showing me. When they're not indisposed. And when I'm willing to follow them."

Which he wasn't, into the not-a-broom-closet of Maker-is-this-hippie-taking-my-harmless-flirting-seriously.

And it's only now he realizes this talk of living quarters is probably not the best discussion to be having with the woman whose house he shared for three years going on four. Her pointed remark (ha, ha) about the dagger loan drives that fact home. No shared weaponry, no shared cutlery, no shared toiletries. No use protesting I wasn't going to ask in the first place!

He does what he can for her, musters the old half-smile that's verging perilously on a smirk. "I wouldn't shave with that dagger if you paid me. I know where it's been." And he's got enough Darkspawn blood circulating about in him already, thanks to the Joining.

But ugh, what is Anders going to do, lob halfhearted quips at her to catch and volley back until she gets tired of the game? Hawke deserves better than this. She always did deserve better than what he could offer, he thinks.

She's the one who left. (That's what he thinks.) She's the one who's calling the shots here. What he offers is going to depend on what he thinks she wants, unless she goads him into some irrevocable action for good or ill. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Hawke, you haven't caught me at my best, here. I've had a little to drink." A little. Justice is far from the forefront of his consciousness most of the time, sated and dormant after the Big Bang, and Anders is enjoying this bit of fleeting freedom from crushing guilt and needless asceticism.

[try_winging_it]

Hawke's mouth flickers towards a smile at his quip about knowing where the dagger's been, at the sight of his smirk. She can't help it. "Hard to get one of the hippies sober enough to explain anything. If you've gotten any sense out of them at all, I'm impressed. Fun company but not exactly lucid." She hasn't had a grand tour either, come to think of it. Well, a bit of a tour from Zevran. She should probably mention that Zevran's here, at some point. Later. He and Anders hadn't exactly hit it off, after all.

Later. That takes her mind past this awkward, surreal moment, or rather to the realization that there will be more than this moment. He's here. That...complicates things. There are so many undealt-with issues between them that she'd be hard-pressed to make a list if she had to, and would find it impossible to pick which one to work on first. But they'll have to be dealt with, sooner or later, one way or another, if they're both here. Their history is too intense to just be ignored or worked around for long. It's a daunting prospect, to say the least.

Much too daunting for tonight. Not at his best...she's certainly seen him worse, but mentioning Justice is more than she wants to deal with so quickly. "I gathered," she says instead, keeping her tone light. "Or you wouldn't be boasting about your card-playing skills, given your complete inability to bluff." But that's not what he meant, and she knows it, and how long can they really keep up this no, nothing's wrong here, everything's totally normal, see? façade? She half-smiles again, but this time there's no humor in it. "Should I leave you to it, then?"

[birdhousesoul]

Does that mean he has a choice, vis-a-vis the possibility of her leaving him alone right now? Should he take it as a good sign that she's asking?

"That's hardly a fair question," and is he joking, or is he talking about something else? Not even Anders can properly tell. "For what it's worth, you're right. I never can manage a proper bluff. Doesn't stop me trying. Or you calling me on it."

[try_winging_it]

Hawke shrugs. "Straightforward enough question, I thought. If you'd rather..." She waves a hand. "...talk later, when you're sober, I won't argue with that. You're the one who said you weren't at your best." Not that she is either, though that's shock rather than brickquer. She'd prefer brickquer.

[birdhousesoul]

Fine. It comes to this, so be it. Blood alcohol content notwithstanding, there's steel in his spine.

"I'm not going to be the one to tell you to go away. Anywhere," he says, flatly. "Even as a joke."

[try_winging_it]

Hawke stiffens. Ah. Here we go. "Why not?" she says quietly but pointedly. "It's a pretty small thing compared to some of the other things you asked me to do."

[birdhousesoul]

It would be a low blow if it weren't true. Still - he glances around. Have they got an audience? Not really; people are either busy drinking, or else more interested in Teo than in some irrelevant conversation between two people who aren't involved in any drinking games at present.

He has to step closer to her, to speak as quietly as this, but his voice is taut and hard, and he's so tense he might as well have foregone the damn brickquer for all the good it's doing him. "Talking about that, here, is not a good idea."