Log: Leon and Cullen in the Heatwave WHO:Two guys with the same face Leon Orcot and Cullen Rutherford WHAT: The SoCal native and the Frostback Mountains native go on patrol in the midst of Vallo's terrible heatwave WHEN: ...like I said, during Vallo's terrible heat wave WHERE: Somewhere in the forest WARNINGS: Leon's laser-ninja-cat-riding-a-unicorn tank top is linked (no real warnings to speak of)
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Leon Orcot was relatively certain that he was never going to get used to this ‘face twin’ thing. It was weird as all hell, and it awakened some weird, primal urge in him. Like something out of Highlander: There can only be one.
But he was, if not used to it, then at least starting to come around to the dea. He’d met Cullen – a different Cullen, but still Cullen – way back when he’d first shown up here in Vallo, and then there’d been that short-lived Raymond guy, and Leon was slowly coming to terms with the idea that his face was just one of those faces that the universe liked to reuse.
It still made his skin crawl, a little, when he and Cullen were partnered up though. At least Cullen had facial hair. And an entirely different sense of style.
Leon, for instance, was wearing a tank top and a pair of jeans – he thought he’d like to be wearing shorts, except for the fact that there was no way in hell he was going to wander around in the forest bare-legged. Shorts would be great for the beach. The beach he currently wished he was relaxing on – or maybe using to surf.
It was definitely the kind of day perfect for surfing. Leon thought it was probably the hottest it had been since he’d shown up in Vallo. The sun, at least, was mostly blocked by the canopy of trees, but that didn’t stop the forest itself from being sweltering, and Leon was glad that he’d thought to pack a couple extra bottles of water. It was the kind of weather that had been common enough in Los Angeles, and especially so in Brazil, which is where he’d spent six months working before he’d saved enough money to follow Count D to Tokyo – which is where he’d come to Vallo from – but he wasn’t as used to it anymore.
No, today was definitely the kind of day he wished he was laying on the beach, sipping daiquiris and pina coladas, and maybe ogling James in a swimsuit.
At least he seemed to be handling the heat better than Cullen did. “How you doing?” he asked. “We can sit for a bit, if you wanted.”
“I can endure,” Cullen grimly replied.
He loathed everything about this weather. He thought he’d escaped it when he came to Vallo in winter and discovered that it actually had winter, unlike Minrathous. What the Tevinter Imperium called winter felt like a rather nice spring day to Cullen. He’d grown up in a mountain village in the south of Ferelden, the kind of place where First Day celebrations still included a pilgrimage to make sure none of your more remote neighbors had frozen to death. He could get used to the constant use of magic in Tevinter and he’d even come to quite enjoy the food, but summer was always a trial.
And now Vallo was in the midst of what felt every bit like a particularly wretched summer day in Minrathous. The shirt he wore under his armor was soaked through with sweat, and the leather armor itself would probably have to air out for a solid week. It was better than the half-plate he’d worn in Kirkwall, at least. Nothing was worse for baking a man alive than setting him in the Gallows Square in full sun in a steel breastplate. This was comparatively not so bad, Cullen had repeatedly told himself. The forest was well-shaded, and leather was hot but not unbearable, and when he finished for the day he could have another one of those glorious showers. (The novelty and joy of Vallo’s modern plumbing had yet to wear off.) In the meantime, there was nothing to do but suffer through–and if there was one thing a former Templar was well-practiced at, it was suffering.
“Alright,” Leon said, hesitantly, frowning a little at the armour. Honestly, armour probably wasn’t a bad idea – the forest was filled with things that could pretty easily disembowel someone, if they wanted, but even if Leon were the type to wear armour, he probably would’ve left it at home on a day like this. But hey, whatever made someone feel safe. “No shame in taking a break if you decide you need one later though. This heat is killer. I saw more than my fair share of heat stroke victims back when I lived in California.
“You’re living in that castle here, right? You guys got AC up there?”
“Yes, thanks to our more modern residents.” The gratitude was evident in Cullen’s tone. “Thank the Maker they thought to tell us it was an option, or I likely wouldn’t have gotten more than an hour of sleep last night.”
He still suffered from a touch of insomnia, and the heat made it a thousand times worse. Air conditioning and Dorian were probably the only things standing between him and utter madness in this heat, Cullen thought. Soldiering on through the day wasn’t nearly so difficult as trying to sleep while thinking about nothing but how Maker-damned hot it was.
"Good. I'd have invited you back to my apartment afterwards for a couple beers if you hadn't," Leon said. Maybe all the thick stones kept the castle cool in weather like this, but no one should have to go through the summer heat without being able to escape to a nice air conditioned room at least for a couple hours.
"What's the weather like back where you're from anyway?"
“Where I most recently lived, unfortunately it was much like this,” Cullen said. “Where I’m from, a summer day feels more or less like the weather we had here around April, and we have the sort of winters that kill people if they aren’t careful. Dorian has been telling me for two years that I’ll get used to the heat, but so far it hasn’t happened.”
“Yeah, I don’t think this is the sorta thing you can really adjust to when you come from someplace cold. It’s pretty hot where I grew up, but I spent a bunch of time travelling around before I ended up here, and those frigid places were fucking awful.” Didn’t matter how many layers he put on. Give him a daiquiri and a beach any day over a Russian winter.
“Even after spending half my life in frigid winters, I can’t recommend them,” Cullen admitted. “I’m used to them and know how to manage, but the fact remains that a single mistake in weather like that can get people injured or killed. I feel as though you have to work a bit harder to die in the heat. It’s just very easy to be miserable enough to pray that the Maker might strike you down out of mercy.”
“A little harder, but not by that much if you’re not keeping yourself hydrated. Here, man,” he added, pulling a water bottle out of his pack and lobbing it at him. “You’ve gotta be dying in all that armour. I don’t think I could do it.”
Cullen caught the water, unscrewed the cap with a sigh, and knocked back a good third of the water in one pull. That really had been a good idea, he admitted to himself. One point on the side of the ledger that read ‘Leon, The Other Man With This Face.’
“I wish I weren’t,” Cullen admitted. “But I trained from the time I was thirteen years old to wear heavy armor and bear a sword and shield and take a hit dead on while someone lighter and faster finishes off the problem as I hold its attention. If I go out without armor fighting like that, I’m likely to lose an arm. The mid-weight leather is actually a compromise.”
“Since you were thirteen?” Leon asked, aghast. When he was thirteen, he and Harry had spent their days skateboarding down to the beach to look at girls and sneaking beers and cigarettes behind his dad’s back.
“Guess in a place like this, armour isn’t a horrible idea. I usually try to make sure that things don’t get close enough to need it.” He gestured with his gun, to say how he kept threats away from him, though it wasn’t always effective; the scars that criss-crossed his bare arms, made by tooth and claw, were testament enough for that. “What sorta things were you fighting? Not people, I take it?” Not with techniques like that, he guessed. It seemed kind of underhanded to distract someone while someone else finished them off, and Cullen didn’t seem the type. He didn’t have the face for it.
“Demons, for the most part,” Cullen replied. “The Inquisition saw all manner of enemies, but demons were our most frequent problem. We didn’t have guns there, but we did have archers and mages who worked at longer range–which works particularly well when you pair them with someone like me.”
Cullen had never been good at small talk; it was something he had to work at deliberately, and more often than not he’d just stand around uncomfortably and look for an exit when stuck with such a conversation. When he had a topic he was comfortable with, though, Cullen could chat at length with no trouble at all. Battle strategy, as it happened, was one of his best.
“If something comes at us from the woods there, for instance–” Cullen nodded to a likely break in the brush. “I charge forward and make myself as large and urgent of a problem as possible, because then whatever it is, it’s forced to deal with me rather than so much as looking at you, my lightly-armored and heavily-armed friend. Ideally I force it into a position where you have a clear shot without me in the way, you shoot it as many times as necessary, and thus is our problem solved without either of us taking more of a beating than we’re equipped for.”
“Ugh, demons,” Leon said, shivering. He didn’t have much experience with demons, really, but he imagined they probably weren’t pleasant.
He followed Cullen’s gaze toward the brush and tensed almost as if something really would come charging out of it, but of course, there wasn’t anything that would be. At least, he assumed not; the general chatter that surrounded them hadn’t changed in tone or topic much.
“That sounds like a pretty good set up, or at least it would be if there was only one thing that was out to kill you. What sort of tactics would you use if there were a lot of little assholes out to eat you?”
That was how Leon had gotten most of his scars, after all – being trapped in an artificial forest while D’s dad sent dozens of prehistoric, genetically modified nightmares after him. But even in Vallo, when shit went down, it rarely ever seemed to be one thing. The creepy fuckers and those weird robot things had both attacked in packs.
“Templars have a few tricks for dealing with being outnumbered,” Cullen replied. “The first is a spell purge - it shuts down all magic in an area, so if you’re faced with something like wraiths, you can render them temporarily defenseless, and your ranged combatants simply have to move fast to pick off as many as they can. Non-magical foes are a bit harder to manage, but there is an ability we used to rather dramatically call The Wrath of Heaven that can stun most anything in a general area. That one tends to take a lot out of me, though, without lyrium, so I prefer to avoid it these days. It’s normally much easier to simply move through giving things a good smacking and yell something particularly foul at the ones I can’t reach to draw their attention. Then I get the little bastards focusing their attack on me, thinking that together they can finish me off, while you shoot them down one after another before they get the chance.”
Leon snorted. “I, too, can piss people off enough that they focus all their attention on me,” he said, shooting Cullen a grin. “But shit, remind me next time there’s an attack to go out with you. It’s a whole lot easier to shoot something when its attention is somewhere other than trying to gnaw your arm off.”
“It’s likewise much easier to herd the nasty things around when someone else is steadily getting rid of them,” Cullen replied, smiling for the first time in the last two hours of miserable heat. He was still drowning in sweat, but there was always something nice about considering a good battle strategy. “I’ll find you next time there’s a problem that can be solved with violence. We work well together, despite how very strange it is to chat with an identical twin I didn’t know I had.”
Leon grinned. “You’re not the first person to show up here with my face,” not even the first Cullen to show up, really, but while he assumed Cullen’s husband or boyfriend or whatever had mentioned that to him before, it was so freaking weird that Leon wasn’t going to mention it, “and it still makes my skin crawl a little. But I’d want you by my side in a fight, even if it’s only to confuse the hell out of the other guy.”
That actually got a laugh out of Cullen, another rarity on patrol in the oppressive heat. “If that fellow Raleigh returns, we can add a third,” he suggested. “If Vallo’s going to keep picking up copies of this face, we might as well make the most of it.”
“Eventually, we’ll have a whole gang of us,” Leon said, except then he went and pictured it and shuddered. “Though, honestly, it feels like some sort of terrible horror movie from my childhood or something. Invasion of the Face Snatchers or something. So I’m fine if it just sticks to us.”
“I hope for the same,” Cullen agreed. “This place is confusing enough as it is. Months in, and still I find myself surprised on a near daily basis. And you’ve been here…what, a year, is it?”
“You and me both, buddy,” Leon agreed. He nodded. “Yeah, close enough to a year, at least. Doesn’t look like I’ll be going anywhere anytime soon, so I’ll probably see the anniversary out.”
Not that it was always easy to tell when someone was going to disappear.
“Prepare yourself, Adora’s probably already planning a team celebration for it if she knows the date.”
Cullen didn’t look as dismayed by the idea of a gathering as he once might have. His enjoyment of being social was still limited by a comparatively small reserve of energy for interaction, but their team was slowly coming over to the side of people who are not draining. It helped that even the most extroverted of the lot were still considerate, and that Adora herself was so good at giving prickly types like him a nudge that never turned into a shove.
With that thought, he took one last gulp of water and handed the bottle back to Leon. “Onward?”
“She’d better not,” he snorted, but with less annoyance than he might’ve felt not long ago. Leon really didn’t mind the team get togethers. They reminded him, sometimes, of nights getting drunk with and fleeced at the poker table by his coworkers back in LA.
He took back his water bottle and clapped Cullen on the shoulder. “Onward,” he agreed, and stepped deeper into the forest.