bythegrace: (Default)
Johanna ([personal profile] bythegrace) wrote in [community profile] northclifflogs2019-07-03 05:45 pm

A Reasonable Reaction

WHO: Johanna and Adhemmar, but also concurrent threads for anyone who is likely to visit her.
WHAT: She is not taking that public execution well.
WHEN: After the execution.
WHERE: Johanna's house, newly built, just outside town.
NOTES: None yet, will update.




Johanna's house is small and wide, built of heavy stones and cement, half atop a deck of hewn logs and a foundation of brick. The waterwheel attached to it moves sluggishly in the water and the quiet scraping knock it makes is a persistent sound. It is loud enough that, once one approaches her door, they might not hear through it. On any other day that would be true, but today she is very upset and she has decided to take that anger out on the furnishings in her home. There are crashes and clangs, shattering sounds and frustrated cursing and they, like the waterwheel, persist.

It is fortunate her home is not precisely inside town and, apart from a precious few folk, there are none who would travel to the river to bother her without good reason.

It is not quite sunset when she finally stops her tantrum (for what else could she call it but that?) and the building goes quiet.

mysteriumtremendum: (atticus | thinking)

[personal profile] mysteriumtremendum 2019-07-04 06:57 am (UTC)(link)
What shocks him the most: that she touches him, stands near to him, or speaks to him with such undisguised hope in her voice and eyes? He's stunned (momentarily, at least) into guileless silence, and stares back at her with widened pale eyes; a bit like an expression a much younger man might wear if suddenly caught up in the arms of his very first paramour.

(He may be an unrepentant heretic, but he's not a particularly worldly one. He is a priest, after all.)

"You too?" she says at last, after a string of incomprehensible Haguennot, and that breaks the spell. He loosens his fingers from their curled fist, and some of the tension in the air eases around them. A wry smirk tugs at the corners of his mouth, and for a moment he very much resembles the cat who got the cream. He could try to free his arms from her grip, if he wanted to. He doesn't.

"You sound surprised," he replies, and has the audacity to sound almost sly about it.
mysteriumtremendum: (atticus | looking right)

[personal profile] mysteriumtremendum 2019-07-06 01:01 am (UTC)(link)
(What does it say about a man who comes alone to a woman's home, where he is more prepared for violence than affection? Nothing flattering, probably.)

Chaste or not, he goes abruptly still under her hands and, once she draws back to whisper at him, stares back at her in stunned silence. It stretches a breath, and then two; his eyes flick across her face without settling anywhere, and whatever cheeky reply he'd had planned is forgotten. Several other things are not forgotten, of course, such as her fingers on his arms, or how her mouth felt against his--

He closes his eyes to draw in a breath, then opens them again, letting it out.

"I'm good at hiding things," he answers her softly. He raises his eyebrows. "I would have burned at the stake years ago, otherwise."
mysteriumtremendum: (Default)

[personal profile] mysteriumtremendum 2019-07-06 01:54 am (UTC)(link)
He regains some of his equilibrium when Johanna releases him, smooths a hand over his cassock to rid it of a few errant wrinkles, then follows her gesture about the room. The disarray more than proves her point.

"How do you stand it? Being so careful?"

In the flickering light of the candle, a bit of broken glass on the floor catches his eye. He kneels down carefully to collect it, examining it in his palm when he straightens up. After a moment, he says, "I have never thought about it in that way. Tolerating caution." He turns to set the shard on the table, where Johanna won't tread across it with her feet, and smooths one thumb deliberately near the edge.

When he looks up at her again, that thin, nearly-there smile is present at the corners of his mouth again. "I suppose there is an element of excitement present in deliberate deception of people who would kill me, if they knew what I was. Some satisfaction in success, in spite of their expectations." He lifts his chin some, expression growing wry. "I have hubris of my own."
mysteriumtremendum: (atticus | thinking)

[personal profile] mysteriumtremendum 2019-07-08 02:58 pm (UTC)(link)
"I am...almost certain I am hunted."

A sobering turn for the conversation to take, indeed, but a necessary one. It answers a question that has been hovering in the back of his mind since he first began to suspect her nature, and now it has come to the fore; it alarms him how preoccupied with the thought he's becoming.

"Who discovered you?" he asks quietly. "In Haguenne."
mysteriumtremendum: (expressive)

[personal profile] mysteriumtremendum 2019-07-09 03:58 am (UTC)(link)
"To understand I must...explain. This...is my home."

How many different ways can one man possibly intrude into the private life of another person? Adhemar has come into her home, coaxed out of her a deadly secret--and now here he stands in her bed chambers, holding a piece of her past. He studies the drawing in pensive silence, noting the quality of the ink and the paints; another layer of mystery laced upon everything that came before it.

"Arcote," he replies rhetorically, looking up at her again. "You've spoken to me of it before, and of what brought you to Northcliff Pass." Her pilgrimage to the mountaintop was still to come, but departing so soon on the heels of the Shepherds' visit would not be wise. He takes a slight step nearer to her to offer the drawing back, mindful of their proximity in this very close, very private space.
mysteriumtremendum: (ominous a f)

[personal profile] mysteriumtremendum 2019-07-11 04:17 am (UTC)(link)
Dépossédé. Is that what Adhemar would be now, had he been born in Haguenne and come into his power there, rather than Maireglenne--the gods' own country if his lessons in the priory were to be believed. They aren't, of course. His faith in anything beyond his own power vanished long before he took his holy orders, but some of the old truisms remain.

(What better way to usurp a god than to deny its existence in the first place?)

"...My daughter and her children. Her husband. My husband."

He looks up from the drawing and watches the play of emotion across her face as she details each loss dealt to her by the plague: a daughter, grandchildren, a son-in-law, a husband. He frowns; in the past parishioners have come to him begging that he perform last rites over the dead and dying, and in those circumstances he performed the necessary emotions that the grief-stricken had come to expect from their vicar over the years. They come to him as easily now, like muscle memory: the gentle reminders that all life is borrowed from the gods, and thus all life must return to the gods' in due course; the funereal sacraments; the follow-up visits to the home once the dead have been buried and the rest of the village has moved on. These steps are expected of him--but to put on such a pantomime for Johanna sits badly with him, and so he says nothing.

"...The bodies clogged the streets but we could not throw them in the water. They shot anyone who attempted to."

"They would not let you leave the city." It's only a guess, rather than an assumption of truth, but from what he has seen of sickness, it is often the case that even the hale and healthy are quarantined to prevent the spread of disease.
mysteriumtremendum: (thinking)

[personal profile] mysteriumtremendum 2019-07-17 03:36 pm (UTC)(link)
"...and that boy drew my own knife on me and called me Profane."

This story does much to explain her initial hostility towards him, though even under the best circumstances the Profane rarely have cause to celebrate encounters with the clergy. Still, the gall of that unknown priest--to threaten and vilify the woman who had just saved his wretched hide from a truly miserable end.

In her shoes, Adhemar would have left him to die. Or dispose of him more ruthlessly when he became a risk.

(Maybe it shows a little in the coldness of his eyes.)

He considers Johanna in silence for a moment or two once she has finished speaking, weighing his words before giving voice to them. Slowly, he says, "I won't ask if you killed him. But know that, if you did," and here he pauses again to meet her eyes, "I would not blame you for it."