Who: @juliangladiator Where: Stumble Inn, back garden When: Around 3-4 weeks after the fall of Aventia Notes: so much yap, so little pay off, sorry bestie
She should have backed out on her deal to revive the garden at the Stumble Inn, and she knew it. More than once, she had stalked through its doors in search of Deja to tender her resignation and tell the woman to find someone else to take up the task. It was not productive, it did not bring her any closer to her abstract goals, and at the end of the day what was the worth of some overgrown garden when the world was on the brink of a second cataclysm? And yet, no matter how directly her feet carried her toward Deja, no matter how resolved she was when she locked eyes with the innkeeper, no matter how frivolous she reminded herself flowers and vines were, she never actually spoke the words. Instead, she would find some sort of excuse or outright lie: they needed to order more fertilizer, the rake had broken again and she needed a new one, she would be gone for a week or two and Deja would need to find someone else to water the thickets of flowers and shrubs accordingly with Juneau’s specifications. But she never got out the words: I quit.
Juneau’s failure to resign from her unofficial role had little to do with the material reward Deja offered her or even a genuine stake in the outcome of the garden’s rehabilitation. She simply liked the solitude. It was quiet there, beyond the thick stone walls and the iron gate that she was always–well, almost always–mindful to lock behind her. In the garden it was always quiet, and though from time to time Deja came to gauge the progress being made and corner Juneau into short check-in conversations, Juneau could count on it as a refuge to be left to her own. She found comfort in the feeling of the cold soil between her fingers, satisfaction in the increasing vibrancy of the leaves and vines, and order in an increasingly disordered world as she fought shrubs back into shapes, flowers back into their designated bed, and trained vines where they ought to grow. All things within the garden came naturally to Juneau. It was a place of action, not of thought. This made it the safest place Juneau could think to go when she needed to escape herself.
It was likely that her blind faith in the garden as a fortress for her overburdened and aching head had been the reason she had forgotten to close and lock the gate behind her. Juneau needed the garden tonight especially–news was constantly coming in regarding Haven and the retreat of the Darkspawn that had previously been plaguing the dedicated place in the world that were-kind had carved out for themselves. The sound of the word Haven weighed on her like a personal loss; the community she might have found there if she was not some blighted wolf–no matter what the author Abelas claimed in his publication–and where she knew Julian would have gone after Aventia fell, even if she had left the crumbling without sparing a minute to ask him. She was certain that it had been the right choice to leave him to himself and those more like him, but the thought of him seemed to be increasingly unshakable over the last few days, even in the garden tonight. For some reason, especially in the garden tonight.
In most other circumstances, she might have cut her losses and sulked toward whatever bed she was calling home for the night, but Juneau wasn’t sure when the next time she would carve out time to root through the mess of the garden would be, especially given the moon overhead was just shy of full. In a few days, she wouldn’t be able to return for four agonizing nights even if she wanted to. Instead, she was resolved to finish the monumental task of clearing the main flower bed which was a complete and total loss. The wiley blonde managed to drag a burlap sack of refuse, dried twigs, leaves, and clods of rocky, uninhabitable dirt to the iron doors of the garden. She ignored the unpleasant screeching the garden door made as she moved it–how many times must she tell Deja it needed fresh oil–and a moment later something else garnered the whole of her attention. Her arms still held their tension and work as the massive burlap sack came to a still behind her and her face was white as a sheet as she stared at Julian exiting the inn from the backdoor. No one was ever out here this late–no one but her and the occasional wayward pair of lovers she took far too much pleasure in sending running and screaming no matter how many times Deja insisted she was not allowed to do so. “What are you doing here?” she asked with all the venom of a weighty accusation as her arms abandoned her work and folded tersely across her small frame.
