wolfe. (abstention) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-01-18 02:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !log, gillian goodwin, wilham wolfe |
your patience is more like panic and you're diving on your own.
Who: Gillian Goodwin & Wilham Wolfe
What: A strained reunion between a commander & her former second-in-command.
Where: Outside Goodwin's Outfitting | At the Black Lions holiday party.
When: Mid-December | The day before Faram's Mass.
Rating: Tame.
Status: Complete.
If there was a certain procedure to creeping one’s way back into a life abandoned for three years, like cramming oneself back into an ill-fitting skin, then he certainly didn’t know it. Word spread throughout the Tower about Wolfe’s return – or at least a shaggy-headed simulacrum of Wilham Wolfe, a reasonable impersonation and counterfeit of his shape and size that took up residence in the building, moving into a spare room on the geomancers’ floor (and that was new, too, the mages reckoned). But the rest of the city and his old associates remained out of the general loop as he tiptoed his way back into the grind, an old weapon searching for its sheath once more. Some things never changed, however: Goodwin’s Outfitting was operational as it always was. The man camped out on the opposite side of the street for hours. He could have walked into the armoury at any moment, a polite trill of the bell above the door announcing his arrival – but he whiled away the hours in the commoners district instead, picking away at his food and drink at a snail’s pace. Seated at an outdoor table of The Roast, a too-small cup of coffee waiting by his elbow, Wolfe could feel the cobblestones through his boots; he knew he could make them contort and writhe beneath his dusty bare hands, but resisted the urge. Just having the power there was a comfort, of sorts. The clock ticked and hours passed until the waitress finally came by with a polite cough to clear his table. This stranger seemed to not mind the cold; he’d been one of few customers happy to sit outside, and so they’d let him linger, but they were now closing up and stacking the chairs indoors. And he could see a brief glimpse of another shopkeep doing the exact same, locking up with the clean, precise motions that he knew so well. Decades couldn’t eradicate that punctilious behaviour, that smoothly unruffled attention to detail. Paying his bill with a few chipped pieces of gil, Wolfe drained the rest of his coffee and then hurried across the street, hands shoved deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched. He was only a couple inches taller than the woman, and so he was able to meet her eye with an apologetic smile. “Hullo, Gilly,” he said. “Shop’s closed,” she said in return, still lingering under its snowy eaves. Locking up the doors soundly for the night, she’d turned with jingling keys in hand, just in time to see the man come hurrying across the street toward her. Gillian’s instincts had kicked in momentarily, the hint of a familiar katana seen inside her longcoat like a fang half-bared and she had almost reached a hand toward it. But the warm glow of the streetlamp allowed her to identify the man more closely - the familiar slope of his shoulders, his apologetic expression (her grip tightened on the keys before she set them inside her coat pocket). In contrast to Wolfe, Gillian had stood up straighter, her expression hinting of questions waiting to be asked. So, she thought to herself. He’s decided to come back then. Gillian shrugged. “You want to buy something, you’ll have to return tomorrow.” She started moving toward the hovercar parked out front, one that had been prone to the whims of the elements for much of the day and now wore a thick blanket of snow. Her sigh billowed up into the crisp winter air like a puff of smoke. The man lingered outside the locked armoury, a boat cut loose and drifting away from the shore, But after another contemplative (or indecisive) beat, then Wolfe fell into step behind her, following Gillian’s lead. Some old habits were easier to pick up than others. “I’m not here for the store,” he said, voice carrying across the empty street. He likely couldn’t afford the shopping even if he was. “I just wanted to…” To what? The man walked in her footsteps, one set of prints leading across the snow towards the car. Wolfe hovered uncertainly behind his once-leader’s shoulder while she fussed with her keys, attention tilted towards the buried car, her shoulders set against him. “Well, to say hello, and apologise, and catch up. I’m back in town now.” I think. “Though it seems I chose a rather interesting time of it to return to Emillion.” Wolfe was scrambling to find the right words, sending them winging across the gap in desperation. A ripple of anxiety seemed to be disturbing his usual unruffled calm: there was a slight quaver in the voice, an attempt to fish for humour. Gillian raised a gloved hand to wipe at the windscreen of the driver door, and in it she could see Wolfe’s reflection behind her, his uncertainty and his struggling. What he wanted, she asked to herself? Certainly it seemed that he didn’t know, or was meandering around his purpose like a hound freshly scolded. She reflected in that moment on what her own purpose was, on going home, finding a better semblance of warmth, and disregarding the idea that the old ghosts had roused and come back to haunt her. As far as she had figured, and three years was quite a long time to sort through all manner of affairs, he had strayed from the pack (and all that was under her purview), and she had gone her own way as always, and that was that. A body in the ground had marked the space between them, more so than time and distance. “So you are, and so you have,” she said, giving a look over her shoulder. The words had come out stronger than she’d anticipated, and this was not Gilly, who had shared drinks and laughs and warm memories, this was the Commander, strict and certain and forged in unwavering steel. The sound of it was like a Pavlovian bell, hardwired to ancient instinct: Wolfe straightened as if finally standing at attention for his captain, unfolding his modest height to afford what it could. Shifting her stance, half facing him now, her eyes gazed over his clothing, his appearance. How much the years (and wherever Wolfe had emerged from, whatever work he had decided to pursue) had changed him. “And how long have you been here?” The why was left to infer. “Only a couple weeks, or thereabouts. I came in towards the tail end of the plague, and fell in a bit with volunteering at the clinics and such. Trying to be helpful, inasmuch as one can during an… event like that.” It was easier to focus on the surroundings around them than on Gillian’s face: details like the cold air sinking into his lungs, the frozen water heaped atop everything, the solid rock lying beneath it all. Wolfe’s dark eyes kept flitting from her eye to nose to chin, picking apart the pieces in an attempt to read the woman’s reaction. Disappointment? Anger? Displeasure? It was hard to tell. Whatever easy synchronicity they’d once shared (communication through body language alone, orders delivered through the flick of a hand or nod of a head), it had now splintered, cracks forming in the glass. But she hadn’t opened the door and disappeared into the car yet. That was something, at least. “I’m sorry for being gone for so long. My protege called me a dick and punched me for it, so you’d be well within your rights to do something similar. If you felt so inclined.” He gave another strained smile. Flynn’s quick-fire anger and elation had been much easier to deal with, her emotions seesawing where Gillian’s remained steady and unwavering on the surface. Anger would’ve been simpler. But as Wolfe continued to speak, Gillian had drug her feet in the fallen snow, turned to face him fully, and in that warm light of the streetlamp she could see his face and his expressions easily enough and without need to strain against the evening’s long shadows. The chill in her lungs as she breathed turned sharp and she exhaled—holding her breath. Her hand balled into a fist as it too made the recollection, of hovering over this same face, one that had stilled forever and eyes that would never open again, nor give the look that Wolfe was offering her now. Anger was a simple, righteous weapon, a fire to burn down enemies - but this, this was the silver-sharp chill of regret, and a sadness that hung in the air between them like twin breaths cast in the dour evening wind. “And that’s where you’ve been staying?” She raised a brow, her every muscle taut like a bow string. Apologies and deviations were thrust down to the ice at their feet, as Gillian went about with her questions, arrows loosed in Wolfe’s direction (but what then was the true target?). “Here to help with your guild?” He bore the interrogation like the loyal second-in-command he’d once been, flinching for one moment like a chastised dog before marshaling himself together. Wolfe’s hands migrated from his pockets to the small of his back, fingers knitting together, one hand locking around the other. Once upon a time, Mathis would have been by his side throughout this sort of ordeal, cracking jokes and knuckles and laughing, offering up the levity to break the tension in scenes like this. But on this wintry night, he was hopelessly alone, reminded all over again of the reason he ran and the loss that sent him running for the hills. Each echo of familiarity here was another shard beneath Wolfe’s skin, worming its way into his heart, his lungs. This was why he’d stayed away from the old city for so long. He thought he’d be able to bear it. Perhaps he couldn’t. Wolfe closed his eyes for a moment, inhaling. By the time he opened his eyes again, he seemed calmer, steadier, better able to bear the stiffness and curtness in Gillian’s voice. Guilt. He’d been outrunning guilt, too. He knew this by now. “I’m staying at the Mages Tower, yes. Picking up my life back in the guild and the city in general, and seeing old friends.” Whether or not they were still friends. “And—in all honesty, I’d be interested in seeing the Company again, if you’d have me.” There. It was out there, planted like a flag in the ground between them, finally seizing his purpose rather than continue tiptoeing around it. She was of an immediate mind to deny him. And for good reason—for all reasons, and Wolfe shouldn’t have even been standing there before her, offering up a bitter shade of what was and what would never be again. The Black Lions were hers, her men as their leader and hers alone to provide for and protect. Gillian had already failed him once, and was not inclined to do so for a second time. “You want back in with the Company,” she said in incredulity. “Just like that.” It took effort not to cut him down there on the side of the street (for his own foolish sake), his flag of peace sliced away at the shaft, but she was not the impulsive sort and was not willing to plainly admit so much by the very action. And so as Wolfe stood at attention and waited for her assent, Gillian assessed him as she once might’ve done while on the field, her hand reaching to rest against the pommel of her katana for reassurance. He’d stopped fidgeting, standing still as a rock. But as another hovercar went rushing down the narrow city street, bathing the evening’s scene in a brief and painful light, all that was strained and frayed and missing (the prominent space of a man identical now empty at Wolfe’s side) was made bare to her eyes, and Gillian was forced to turn away. She exhaled. Releasing old miseries to the air, she began to fish out her keys again. “Come on, get in,” she told him with her back now turned once again (and the curve of her shoulders had changed almost imperceptibly). “I’m bringing you back to the Tower.” Deciding she’d be damned if she was about to discuss the rest of this on the side of the street—in front of her family’s shop no less, as if Gillian was in the habit of announcing all personal business (and what could be more personal than this?) to those passersby, she quickly made up her mind to see him returned before anything else. “Like a truant child,” Wolfe said, “being dragged back home.” And there was some of the old wistful humour resurfacing, bone-deep and weary but present nonetheless. Gillian, however, seemed less than amused (by the circumstance, if not the joke. He opened the passenger door and ducked into the interior, bundling himself into a seat that looked too small for him: legs drawn up, shoulders back, one arm braced against the cold window with its thin layer of frost. “I’m unsurprised to see you still have the same car. Can’t see you ever getting rid of this old thing.” Banalities, of course, and not what they truly needed to discuss. Wolfe kept his eyes firmly rooted on the street, hands clasped together in his lap as if against the chill (though it hadn’t bothered him much, for years now). Eventually, his attention slid back to her as she coaxed the engine to life. “No improving on a classic model,” Gillian had replied dryly (just as she had done many years before). Her katana was lodged in the space between them, and the samurai busied herself with the hovercar’s controls—and deliberately not on keeping an eye on the mage boxed into the space beside her. Every sigh and twitch of movement seemed emphasized in the small size of the car’s interior, which made her all the more aware of the truth of Wolfe’s presence and as such, old memories began to shift themselves up out of the lonely dirt unbidden. With a flip of a switch on the console in front of her, a burst of air had removed the remainder of the snow from the windows, and with the press of a button, the magicite-fueled headlights burst a cool beam of light across the quiet length of street in front of them. “Hope you’re strapped in,” she said, and the hovercar went roaring down the street. As they turned down the first city block and in the general direction of the Tower, Gillian tried to ease herself into the idea that she would need to engage Wolfe in an actual discussion—something more than the terse handful questions she’d offered thus far. A different sort of opponent this was, the past, but she’d face it down all the same. “Now,” she said, eyes wandering briefly to the man sitting beside her, “tell me what you’ve been doing for the past three years.” It was like the unofficial interview they’d conducted all those years ago—but back then it had been nothing more than a formality, two friends meeting over coffee while Gillian laid her plans on the table and told Wilham about the company she was starting. Here, though informal, the questions meant so much more, carrying weight like an anchor. “I switched job classes, for one.” The guttering heating of the car had warmed the windows enough to see, but Wolfe pressed his hand against the glass and the rest of the condensation fell away, skin heated through with fire. “There was quite a bit of camping, journeying, living in the wilderness. In the forests, in the mountains. I became a geomancer, and I trained and trained. Came across a few traveling companions along the way.” Never permanent ones; they always parted at the end as if they’d never been. “I visited the temples, out-of-the-way churches. Searching for something, I suppose. I eventually found it in the form of another group of adventurers, the Disciples. We don’t take gil for our labours. I like to think that it keeps me centred. There were too many memories here to return, at first – the empty wilderness was better – but after some time with them, I finally felt ready to come back. So I’m back.” His mouth twisted in a rueful smile. “Plus, admittedly, I missed society.” It was an inventory of his missing years, the details he’d conveniently skimmed over with Flynn—for the younger mage he painted it like an adventure, an extended vacation. Here, Wolfe could name it for what it was. Gillian had listened intently, one arm resting against the groove of the window’s edge while her other hand rested easy on the wheel. A perfect deception of comfort and familiarity, each detail of Wolfe’s tale echoed through her ears like the pound of a carpenter’s hammer. It had been one thing to stretch the imagination on a cold day and wonder, and another thing entirely to know and to hear it from the man himself. It should’ve been some relief for the commander to know that her subordinate (friend, co-conspirator, brother in battle once upon a time) was by all appearances still alive and well, thriving perhaps in the company of others—but there, that was the sharp edge, the bitter-copper taste on the tongue, the detail that wedged like a metal sliver underneath her skin. “The others miss you,” she offered, off-handed like it was a comment on the weather, the snow, the warm lights in the shop windows marking their path along the lonely city streets. Gillian didn’t offer her own feelings alongside the admission. She held onto them tight in a white-knuckled grip. “Close enough to Faram’s Mass,” she said, “there’s time enough to make an appearance.” She had meant the usual party held on the evening before the big holiday, where the largest number of their once-shared comrades gathered to the offices to celebrate. While the year had done its best to stand out from the rest, Gillian had expected the event to pass without any marked peculiarities. A bad bet she realized now, glancing sideways. As if sensing that slight shift in the atmosphere, he met her sidelong gaze wordlessly. It seemed he was on the verge of adding something—some word or question hovering on the brink of his tongue, welling up in his throat, clotting like treacle—but Wolfe swallowed it. Relief sat in his words like grit: “That sounds fantastic. I appreciate it, Gillian,” he said (and there it was, a retreat from the old nickname). “I miss the Company. I’d love to stop by and see everyone again, catch up, see how the old ship’s been sailing without me.” Perhaps it was a misstep, and it led to a strained smile from first mate to skipper, before his dark eyes slid away like oil on water. He redirected his attention to the road as it flickered away beneath them; it was a much safer sight than the blonde beside him. And like that, they drifted into the comfortable purr of the engine, the dip of the car as it trundled along down the street and into the night, navigating the silences between these two. The Faram’s Mass party was just as he remembered, and also nothing like it. Seven years and seven holiday parties. It was a long time to work with the same company—it had led to memorising each of their faces into a mental tapestry, the social landscape of the Black Lions. Some were new and eyed him with polite, distant interest, while others greeted him with warm claps on the back. Wolfe instinctively skirted around the ones who seemed to stare too long, jarred from seeing a ghost return from the grave and still stalking their ranks, his scarred face split into a strained smile. But somehow, at some point over the course of the evening, between the fourth and fifth drinks (Wolfe was not the type to indulge, but this occasion set it tumbling loose like a rockslide), he felt himself relax. Almost like old times. The black-mage-now-geomancer asked after the past three years and they shared riproaring tales of assignments pulled off by the skin of their teeth, the men and women of the Lions grinning through their drinks, merry despite the chasm between them. He listened like an outsider, nodding in all the right places, laughing when appropriate. It almost looked normal. Not quite the same, but perhaps close enough. Gillian had watched it all from a distance. He had come to the party with her blessing, but the leader had made no quick move to engage with Wolfe herself. Too busy, perhaps, allowing herself to be pulled from one corner of the room to the next, and drinks had evolved from coffee to alcohol gradually through the night, as playing cards exchanged with cigarettes, and the jokes and boasts grew louder and larger. Surrounded by a sea of her comrades (and they were hers, a strange family of sorts forged together by blood and glory and an indefinable pride), they all made for a serviceable barrier placed between her and her former second-in-command. The two had spent those previous seven years and seven parties prior side-by-side, after all, and it was no matter of wonder why the image now looked so askew. She offered him a look, finally, sometime late in the evening, when the revelry and merriment had crept underneath her skin and lodged themselves warmly inside her chest (or maybe that was just the effect of the drinks). Gillian recalled to herself how easy it might’ve been once, to simply go over, throw a friendly arm across his shoulders and drag Wolfe along with her. Straining her vision, she was almost able to picture it still—but the effort left a sting, and she eventually turned away. Down the hall and toward the quiet solace of her office she went, like a beast straying from her own pack. Not quite the same, she realized, not at all. |