"Almost. Unbelievably close, I'd say." This is not flattery. She really is so good at it, picking it up so ridiculously quickly after seeing it once, that Anders rather suspects she must have danced a similar dance plenty of times before. Why she's bothering to 'learn' from him, he couldn't possibly imagine. Something's off.
(Anders, meet the Bene Gesserit, post-God-Emperor, pedigree straight out of Leto's breeding program. Prana-bindu muscular control, much? Insane speed and agility? The closest thing Anders has ever seen is a well-cast Haste spell. There's no way he can begin to comprehend what he's really seeing here, not without a detailed lecture and possibly some diagrams.)
Nor is he deluded enough to believe a woman this attractive would pretend not to know a dance she already knows quite well, just to get closer to Anders. He's not the sweet young thing he was in his Circle days. More like an ... early-middle-aged thing? Oh, he won't downplay his obvious charms, but he's realistic. She could do as well or better without going to any trouble.
Still, she's got to have her reasons, they can't be too terribly sinister, she can't pick his pockets because he's got none in this robe, and he can call upon magic at any time for self-defense or to heal a sudden knife to the gut or whatnot, so why let suspicion spoil their fun? Probably it all has to do with some silly thing completely unrelated to him. Trying to catch someone's eye across the room, perhaps? He can help her out with that. He smiles upon all such endeavors.
"Like this," and he stands beside her, does the next part again. "Right, that's it. Beautiful."
Sheeana certainly doesn't mind looking at Anders. His is a body well formed for fighting but not some painted, strutting gladiator. She admires its obvious utility the way one admires a crysknife: it's something that does one thing extremely well. That it can do more than that is a bonus.
But mostly, she just likes dancing, and learning a new one is worth it enough for her. And seeing someone perform a so Siaynoq-esque dance has made her a little homesick. That also makes her more inclined to seek company, to keep it at bay.
"I'm Sheeana." She says, imitating the third step in slow motion. "This reminds me of the dances of my homeworld." Don't let that fool you, Anders. Rakis isn't a very sexy place ever since the Sietch Orgy went out of fashion.
Rakis? Unsexy? But all those phallic sandworms, with their tooth-studded gaping holes for mouths! It's sexy in the most frightfully Freudian way. To say nothing of the acrid allure of eau de stillsuit. Rakis: It's For Lovers.
Anders should never, ever learn so much about Rakis. He already has screaming nightmares about the Deep Roads, no need for new nightmare fuel. And he would make jokes. You don't make jokes about the destruction of someone's village and the demise of their family in the gut of a giant sandworm unless you are Anders.
Sheeana's revelation makes him chuckle. "Aha! I did think you must've done this before." Her motivation's as good as solved for him, then. Anders is the man who, through all sorts of escapes and dire straits and sudden desperate flights, insisted on carrying with him the tiny embroidered pillow his mother made for him as a child. (He didn't get to bring the pillow that time he swam the lake to escape. Even the tiniest pillow - well. But the Templars brought him back again, to his beloved tiny keepsake pillow.) He understands homesickness.
So she knows the steps, just not the order to string them together in, he thinks. (It's still beyond him that a human can watch an entire long dance routine and remember all of it from watching the one time. All he's really been doing for Sheeana is correcting the fine nuances that viewing alone wouldn't fully convey.) "Then I'm all the more flattered that you actually liked my dancing, if you're a connoisseur. It's a Rivaini dance - we've only got the one planet where I'm from - hmmm, you've got that one, this comes next, and this." He demonstrates, then makes corrections where needed, his hands at her waist or reaching to adjust the angle of her arm for a flutter. "Tell me of the dances of your homeworld, Sheeana."
Hawke, having managed to set aside her wrestling with temptation with the help of something tall, dark, and full-bodied (and made of alcohol), wanders back through the bar. And catches sight of Anders, with his hands on the waist of someone tall, dark, and full-bodied (and definitely not made of alcohol).
There's an instant of fury. Whether it's towards the owner of the hands or the waist is hard to say.
But the instant vanishes once she identifies the owner of the waist.
Oh. Oh, this should be...interesting. Interesting is a nice, vague term for what this will probably be, given all the potential for awkward and bizarre in this meeting. Be careful what you wish for, isn't that the saying? She was just wishing Sheeana were here to provide a distraction.
Hawke's grin is positively wicked as she moves through the crowd towards them, because awkward and bizarre or not, she's very curious as to what will happen. "Don't tell me you need lessons, blue-eyes. I've seen you dance. Anders, I see you've met Sheeana." Her tone is amused rather than catty, and there's no edge to the words. She did mean it as a compliment rather than an insult.
When Anders notices Hawke, it's by voice. His hands are now on Sheeana's hips again, he's standing behind her, and he's looking down at the position of her right foot on the floor.
It wouldn't take Bene Gesserit perception to detect the tension that tightens his fingers, his arms, by extension the rest of him, at the moment he registers that voice. It's just a moment, and then he relaxes a little (well? I'm not doing anything wrong), and looks up, lets his hands fall away from his dancing student/partner. Blue-eyes, is it? They know one another. Huh.
He stays where he is, though, behind Sheeana. "Yes, you see we've met," he agrees. "And you both know my name is Anders." Not Sebastian. Hawke, you should know better than to call him one name before you find out whether he's using the other! "And her eyes are very blue. You both have blue eyes. I'm the odd one out, then. Blue eyes, beauty, wit, grace, charm, fashion sense. It makes sense you're acquainted."
Sheeana pops back into place from a particularly difficult looking step. Yes, Anders. Continue to stroke her ego. It will distract her from how potentially awkward this could be.
Don't mention your shared alias-game though. Elsewise one Lady Bellonda will start getting into all sorts of depravity.
"You have good taste though." She said to Anders then looked over at Hawke. "As pretty a bird as ever I see. To tell the truth, it reminded me of the Siaynoq dancers back on my home planet." She gives Hawke a long once over. Gods below but i'm racking them up tonight. And they know each other? Well. This is going to be interesting.
"Her eyes are bluer than mine," Hawke says with surprising cheerfulness as she joins them; she's always thrived on problematic situations, it's a terrible habit and not at all part of what's always attracted her to Anders, no no. "Must disagree on the fashion sense though, I haven't got any of that." Which is true. She dresses for practicality rather than effect, even if she is showing more cleavage than usual today; that was for the espionage work earlier, so it counts as business rather than fashion sense.
"Besides, you have a number of those other qualities yourself, as I've frequently heard you boast, so stop pretending to feel out of your class. If anything, I am; I can't dance. Not much, at least, certainly nothing like either of you can. And yes, we're acquainted, Sheeana is from the station also." Which is why she called you Anders, Anders. Aliases don't apply for stationers. Station-siders? What's the word for residents of a space station? Blasted Void vocabulary, she'll never get the hang of it. "I didn't know you were here, blue-eyes. It's been a while." It's a genuine if slightly apologetic smile; Hawke's been distracted lately, to say the least.
Anders will just keep throwing compliments at both women, in hopes that most of the compliments will stick. "I've never claimed to have blue eyes or fashion sense. The rest of it I can't very well deny, but even I know when I'm outclassed." She's from the station. Ah. Anders has an idea that there are all kinds of Void-sailing ships docking on all kinds of planets, and that anyone he sees may come from any of those, so he hasn't assumed ...
... that she's a fellow revolutionary!
"I wish I'd known you were one of us," he chides Sheeana, as though it would be reasonable to just walk up to someone and say in the name of our shared cause, give me a dancing lesson! And oddly enough, he likes her more for this (assumed) allegiance than he has for her striking looks.
It's a little odd to be standing behind Sheeana now that the dancing lesson is clearly over - creates an imbalance - so he steps out and to the side. Now he can see both the others' faces. "I would have been friendlier," he continues. (Even friendlier? Oh, Anders.) "And we could compare notes. Hawke and I have had a busy day."
Pretending to be Sebastian, and scaring someone in a bar.
"I have been inside a meeting all day with the council and Tanabe. Between her and councilwoman Svinboera, there's enough earnest naivette to power the whole station." She says conspiratorialy. Unlike Hauptmann, Svinboera is liked most places.
"I'm ready for a little oblivion." As much as a Reverend Mother can get anyway. "You two are from the same place." Not that hard a conclusion to come to. She hears the same language from them in the fraction of a second before her translator kicks in, and they dress the same way.
Once upon a time, Anders would have leapt upon that little remark and made it the centerpiece of some elaborate pickup-line bouquet he could present to her with a casual flourish. Ready for a little oblivion, indeed. That has so much potential. He can still recognize that, at least, the way he can still admire Sheeana's lean spare curves, a fighter's physique not unlike his own, given to economy rather than excess. The skirt obscures it, some; his hands know better.
Because he is what he is now, the mention of councilwoman Svinboera captures his attention more. He's disappointed rather than intrigued at Sheeana's discursive gambit to cut off that line of conversation. It's only a mild disappointment. She lives on the station; there will be other opportunities to talk politics and foment dissent.
"We do come from the same homeworld," he confirms, using the word Sheeana used. "Thedas, it's called. Hawke and I go way back, worked together for years. She'd kill things, I'd patch her up so she could kill more things, I'd kill some things too, she'd pick some locks. All in all, more excitement and danger than you can shake a staff at, when we weren't returning people's lost hats and books and little sacks of human remains."
Worked together for years, that bit of understatement will probably not win Anders any approval points.
Rivalry +5, Anders.try_winging_itDecember 20 2011, 13:43:23 UTC
Hawke would like to ask how things went with the council and Ai (who she likes, someone genuinely nice is refreshing), and the discussions for the new holiday. She avoided those; Thedas isn't much for holidays, and her instincts to invent outrageously improbable celebration rituals would have been extremely amusing but probably not helpful, so she resisted the urge to take part.
As it happens, she gets distracted. Because just as Anders mentions Hawke and I go way back, she notices what he's wearing. Not just the Tevinterish robes made of more hole than robe, no, it's the accessories. One of them in particular. He's wearing the blasted Tevinter amulet she gave him. It wasn't much of a gift really, she just ran across it in a chest in a dungeon somewhere and thought he might like it (It's shiny and subversive!). A declaration not of love, that gift, but of loyalty, affinity, shared beliefs in how badly mages were treated in Thedas (not that Tevinter's solution was better, but that was a different discussion). It'd meant a great deal to him. He'd never dared to wear it outside, the things were illegal, but he'd worn it at home. Hawke hadn't realized he still had it, much less that he had it here.
And he's wearing it now while saying that they worked together for years.
Hawke's eyes narrow. It's slight, but it wouldn't take Petit Perception to pick up on it.
And then she looks back at Sheeana, who deserves better than this and who she will probably feel a bit guilty about using in this fashion later, but what the hell. "A little oblivion is exactly what I need as well." That much is perfect truth, at least. Hawke holds out her hand. "Dance with me, blue-eyes?"
(( *dies* I swear this thread wasn't intended to use Sheeana to make one another feel jealous! So, have a Typical Anders Moment (TM), to reinstate posting order and change the thread to a two-person party... He can still feel jealous, all by himself in a little sad thread on his own. Make him miserable, ladies, he deserves it.))
Anders doesn't need petit perception to pick up on Hawke's moods. He really has worked with her for years, among the other things he's done with her for years, and he's not a complete idiot (when he's not blinded by Justice or selectively ignoring what doesn't fit his political agenda). Her eyes are shards of pale blue ice. This bodes no good.
Obviously, it was something Anders said. It usually is, when it's not something he didn't say. He has said nothing about Sebastian, Featherhead, mages, the plight of mages, the anatomy of the prophet Andraste, or anything he's ever wanted to do with Hawke besides working. Surely he can't have shoved his foot too deeply into his mouth?
(Somewhere in Amaranthine, Namaya must be waking from a particularly amusing dream, or experiencing a sudden and inexplicable buoyancy of mood, or some such thing. She warned the Warden-Commander against Anders' sweet-talking, and now what's become of that skill?)
"Blue-eyes," he mutters to himself, helplessly watching Hawke lead his dancing partner away. There's got to be a story there, and if he watches them long enough, he's sure to figure some of it out.
In fact, to someone with Petit Perception they might as well be shouting at each other: "YOU RAN OFF!" "I RESENT THAT COMMENT!" "STOP LEAVING THE TOILET SEAT UP!" Sheeana has the urge to put her hands over her ears. It's a whole couple's fight executed with nothing but faces.
And she can hear that, Anders.
So she follows Hawke and for exactly two songs she dances with her like she's never danced with another person before (hypnotized sandworms are another matter entirely). She's spinning, catching her, doing vaguely suggestive things. Anyone who wasn't as fit as Hawke, she was sure, would have collapsed.
At the end of the table, she looks back to see Murbella and one of the...acolytes? She looks shorter than she remembers.
She strokes a thumb along Hawke's cheek. "It looks like official business just caught up with me. Goodnight, pretty bird."
And with that she's off to join Mother Superior.
Sheeana likes dancing and she likes getting laid, but neither of those things is more important to her than her pride, which will not allow her to be used as a brickbat between wandering tomb raiders in love.
Hawke watches Sheeana leave with the sickening realization that that was a significantly more courteous farewell than she deserved. Sheeana wears pride like a cloak at the best of times. Was it anger, pity or just that pride alone, that caused her to go along with Hawke's offer at all, in the circumstances? Given how athletic those dances were, she's betting on anger.
Count up what you've accomplished today, Hawke. You managed to be on friendly terms with Anders for a while before it all got ballsed up, and even if it was entirely his fault (damned wandering hands) that it got ballsed up he doesn't realize it was, so that's all you. You've moped around a bar and managed not to get blindingly drunk, so well done there. You succeeded in finding someone to dance with, but in the process managed to justifiably piss off one of the few actual friends you have and identify with on the station (aside from any other possible complications that are now almost certainly moot), and you'd better hope she lets you apologize later. Suspect you're not going to need to explain, that situation was painfully, humiliatingly transparent.
On the good side of things, you have a name. Oh, and possibly some future lessons in how to fire a gun. Long live the fucking revolution.
Hawke decides it's long past time to leave, before she does anything else to screw up her life this day, and heads for the door.
(Anders, meet the Bene Gesserit, post-God-Emperor, pedigree straight out of Leto's breeding program. Prana-bindu muscular control, much? Insane speed and agility? The closest thing Anders has ever seen is a well-cast Haste spell. There's no way he can begin to comprehend what he's really seeing here, not without a detailed lecture and possibly some diagrams.)
Nor is he deluded enough to believe a woman this attractive would pretend not to know a dance she already knows quite well, just to get closer to Anders. He's not the sweet young thing he was in his Circle days. More like an ... early-middle-aged thing? Oh, he won't downplay his obvious charms, but he's realistic. She could do as well or better without going to any trouble.
Still, she's got to have her reasons, they can't be too terribly sinister, she can't pick his pockets because he's got none in this robe, and he can call upon magic at any time for self-defense or to heal a sudden knife to the gut or whatnot, so why let suspicion spoil their fun? Probably it all has to do with some silly thing completely unrelated to him. Trying to catch someone's eye across the room, perhaps? He can help her out with that. He smiles upon all such endeavors.
"Like this," and he stands beside her, does the next part again. "Right, that's it. Beautiful."
Reply
But mostly, she just likes dancing, and learning a new one is worth it enough for her. And seeing someone perform a so Siaynoq-esque dance has made her a little homesick. That also makes her more inclined to seek company, to keep it at bay.
"I'm Sheeana." She says, imitating the third step in slow motion. "This reminds me of the dances of my homeworld." Don't let that fool you, Anders. Rakis isn't a very sexy place ever since the Sietch Orgy went out of fashion.
Reply
Anders should never, ever learn so much about Rakis. He already has screaming nightmares about the Deep Roads, no need for new nightmare fuel. And he would make jokes. You don't make jokes about the destruction of someone's village and the demise of their family in the gut of a giant sandworm unless you are Anders.
Sheeana's revelation makes him chuckle. "Aha! I did think you must've done this before." Her motivation's as good as solved for him, then. Anders is the man who, through all sorts of escapes and dire straits and sudden desperate flights, insisted on carrying with him the tiny embroidered pillow his mother made for him as a child. (He didn't get to bring the pillow that time he swam the lake to escape. Even the tiniest pillow - well. But the Templars brought him back again, to his beloved tiny keepsake pillow.) He understands homesickness.
So she knows the steps, just not the order to string them together in, he thinks. (It's still beyond him that a human can watch an entire long dance routine and remember all of it from watching the one time. All he's really been doing for Sheeana is correcting the fine nuances that viewing alone wouldn't fully convey.) "Then I'm all the more flattered that you actually liked my dancing, if you're a connoisseur. It's a Rivaini dance - we've only got the one planet where I'm from - hmmm, you've got that one, this comes next, and this." He demonstrates, then makes corrections where needed, his hands at her waist or reaching to adjust the angle of her arm for a flutter. "Tell me of the dances of your homeworld, Sheeana."
Reply
There's an instant of fury. Whether it's towards the owner of the hands or the waist is hard to say.
But the instant vanishes once she identifies the owner of the waist.
Oh. Oh, this should be...interesting. Interesting is a nice, vague term for what this will probably be, given all the potential for awkward and bizarre in this meeting. Be careful what you wish for, isn't that the saying? She was just wishing Sheeana were here to provide a distraction.
Hawke's grin is positively wicked as she moves through the crowd towards them, because awkward and bizarre or not, she's very curious as to what will happen. "Don't tell me you need lessons, blue-eyes. I've seen you dance. Anders, I see you've met Sheeana." Her tone is amused rather than catty, and there's no edge to the words. She did mean it as a compliment rather than an insult.
Reply
It wouldn't take Bene Gesserit perception to detect the tension that tightens his fingers, his arms, by extension the rest of him, at the moment he registers that voice. It's just a moment, and then he relaxes a little (well? I'm not doing anything wrong), and looks up, lets his hands fall away from his dancing student/partner. Blue-eyes, is it? They know one another. Huh.
He stays where he is, though, behind Sheeana. "Yes, you see we've met," he agrees. "And you both know my name is Anders." Not Sebastian. Hawke, you should know better than to call him one name before you find out whether he's using the other! "And her eyes are very blue. You both have blue eyes. I'm the odd one out, then. Blue eyes, beauty, wit, grace, charm, fashion sense. It makes sense you're acquainted."
Reply
Don't mention your shared alias-game though. Elsewise one Lady Bellonda will start getting into all sorts of depravity.
"You have good taste though." She said to Anders then looked over at Hawke. "As pretty a bird as ever I see. To tell the truth, it reminded me of the Siaynoq dancers back on my home planet." She gives Hawke a long once over. Gods below but i'm racking them up tonight. And they know each other? Well. This is going to be interesting.
Reply
"Besides, you have a number of those other qualities yourself, as I've frequently heard you boast, so stop pretending to feel out of your class. If anything, I am; I can't dance. Not much, at least, certainly nothing like either of you can. And yes, we're acquainted, Sheeana is from the station also." Which is why she called you Anders, Anders. Aliases don't apply for stationers. Station-siders? What's the word for residents of a space station? Blasted Void vocabulary, she'll never get the hang of it. "I didn't know you were here, blue-eyes. It's been a while." It's a genuine if slightly apologetic smile; Hawke's been distracted lately, to say the least.
Reply
... that she's a fellow revolutionary!
"I wish I'd known you were one of us," he chides Sheeana, as though it would be reasonable to just walk up to someone and say in the name of our shared cause, give me a dancing lesson! And oddly enough, he likes her more for this (assumed) allegiance than he has for her striking looks.
It's a little odd to be standing behind Sheeana now that the dancing lesson is clearly over - creates an imbalance - so he steps out and to the side. Now he can see both the others' faces. "I would have been friendlier," he continues. (Even friendlier? Oh, Anders.) "And we could compare notes. Hawke and I have had a busy day."
Pretending to be Sebastian, and scaring someone in a bar.
Reply
"I'm ready for a little oblivion." As much as a Reverend Mother can get anyway. "You two are from the same place." Not that hard a conclusion to come to. She hears the same language from them in the fraction of a second before her translator kicks in, and they dress the same way.
Reply
Because he is what he is now, the mention of councilwoman Svinboera captures his attention more. He's disappointed rather than intrigued at Sheeana's discursive gambit to cut off that line of conversation. It's only a mild disappointment. She lives on the station; there will be other opportunities to talk politics and foment dissent.
"We do come from the same homeworld," he confirms, using the word Sheeana used. "Thedas, it's called. Hawke and I go way back, worked together for years. She'd kill things, I'd patch her up so she could kill more things, I'd kill some things too, she'd pick some locks. All in all, more excitement and danger than you can shake a staff at, when we weren't returning people's lost hats and books and little sacks of human remains."
Worked together for years, that bit of understatement will probably not win Anders any approval points.
Reply
As it happens, she gets distracted. Because just as Anders mentions Hawke and I go way back, she notices what he's wearing. Not just the Tevinterish robes made of more hole than robe, no, it's the accessories. One of them in particular. He's wearing the blasted Tevinter amulet she gave him. It wasn't much of a gift really, she just ran across it in a chest in a dungeon somewhere and thought he might like it (It's shiny and subversive!). A declaration not of love, that gift, but of loyalty, affinity, shared beliefs in how badly mages were treated in Thedas (not that Tevinter's solution was better, but that was a different discussion). It'd meant a great deal to him. He'd never dared to wear it outside, the things were illegal, but he'd worn it at home. Hawke hadn't realized he still had it, much less that he had it here.
And he's wearing it now while saying that they worked together for years.
Hawke's eyes narrow. It's slight, but it wouldn't take Petit Perception to pick up on it.
And then she looks back at Sheeana, who deserves better than this and who she will probably feel a bit guilty about using in this fashion later, but what the hell. "A little oblivion is exactly what I need as well." That much is perfect truth, at least. Hawke holds out her hand. "Dance with me, blue-eyes?"
Reply
Anders doesn't need petit perception to pick up on Hawke's moods. He really has worked with her for years, among the other things he's done with her for years, and he's not a complete idiot (when he's not blinded by Justice or selectively ignoring what doesn't fit his political agenda). Her eyes are shards of pale blue ice. This bodes no good.
Obviously, it was something Anders said. It usually is, when it's not something he didn't say. He has said nothing about Sebastian, Featherhead, mages, the plight of mages, the anatomy of the prophet Andraste, or anything he's ever wanted to do with Hawke besides working. Surely he can't have shoved his foot too deeply into his mouth?
(Somewhere in Amaranthine, Namaya must be waking from a particularly amusing dream, or experiencing a sudden and inexplicable buoyancy of mood, or some such thing. She warned the Warden-Commander against Anders' sweet-talking, and now what's become of that skill?)
"Blue-eyes," he mutters to himself, helplessly watching Hawke lead his dancing partner away. There's got to be a story there, and if he watches them long enough, he's sure to figure some of it out.
Reply
And she can hear that, Anders.
So she follows Hawke and for exactly two songs she dances with her like she's never danced with another person before (hypnotized sandworms are another matter entirely). She's spinning, catching her, doing vaguely suggestive things. Anyone who wasn't as fit as Hawke, she was sure, would have collapsed.
At the end of the table, she looks back to see Murbella and one of the...acolytes? She looks shorter than she remembers.
She strokes a thumb along Hawke's cheek. "It looks like official business just caught up with me. Goodnight, pretty bird."
And with that she's off to join Mother Superior.
Sheeana likes dancing and she likes getting laid, but neither of those things is more important to her than her pride, which will not allow her to be used as a brickbat between wandering tomb raiders in love.
Reply
Count up what you've accomplished today, Hawke. You managed to be on friendly terms with Anders for a while before it all got ballsed up, and even if it was entirely his fault (damned wandering hands) that it got ballsed up he doesn't realize it was, so that's all you. You've moped around a bar and managed not to get blindingly drunk, so well done there. You succeeded in finding someone to dance with, but in the process managed to justifiably piss off one of the few actual friends you have and identify with on the station (aside from any other possible complications that are now almost certainly moot), and you'd better hope she lets you apologize later. Suspect you're not going to need to explain, that situation was painfully, humiliatingly transparent.
On the good side of things, you have a name. Oh, and possibly some future lessons in how to fire a gun. Long live the fucking revolution.
Hawke decides it's long past time to leave, before she does anything else to screw up her life this day, and heads for the door.
Reply
Leave a comment