#i'm fascinated by canach and anise's relationship so i Had to sketch out what their initial meeting might have been like

[sparxwrites]

(it’s ya boy sparx, heelying in eight weeks late with starbucks and fic for a fandom none of my followers are in! gotta stay true to my incredibly erratic form. anyways, yall should play gw2, it’s a good game.)

[AO3]

“Canach.” There was, abruptly, a woman’s voice behind him, sweet as honey and dark as smoke. “How’s jail been treating you? Rather poorly, it seems. Pity. You looked like such a sweet young thing when you were bringing a horde of karka down on Lion’s Arch. Or so I’ve been told.”

Canach grit his teeth, suppressing a flinch of surprise. Not that there was anywhere to go, stuck in a chair with his wrists manacled to a table and the table bolted to the floor – and a pair of guards outside the door to boot. Visitor’s rooms at the Vigil Keep, it seemed, were irritatingly thorough.

And populated with invisible visitors, to boot.

“I’m sorry,” he said, infusing the words with as much irritated insincerity as he could manage, “have we met? I’m afraid I don’t do terribly well at recognising mysteriously disembodied voices.”

“Where are my manners?” said the voice, as its body walked into view. “Countess Anise– well. Ordinarily, I’d say at your service, but…” She smiled, and it was the smile of a predator faced with its prey in a snare. “I think, in this case, that you’re rather at mine.”

If he’d expected any visitors at all – and he hadn’t – it would have been a firstborn or two, come to tell him how terribly disappointed they were in him, and how very sad he’d made the Pale Mother. If she’d even noticed her wayward child’s misbehaviour at all, that was.

He certainly hadn’t expected a human, dressed like she had money and with voice like someone clever. A bad combination, in Canach’s books.

“That’s an awfully bold assumption.”

“Not really.” Her voice, initially so pleasant on the ear, was starting to burrow into his brain like a particularly tenacious insect.

“And what does that mean?” He was staring at her, blatantly, and didn’t much care that he was being rude. He didn’t much enjoy having conversations on the back foot – which he very much was, currently – and any kind of information he could glean about his mysterious visitor would be most welcome.

Low cut dress, expensive but tasteful jewellery, no visible weapons, and no guards other than the ones outside the door… She was either stupid, less important than she looked, or capable enough of defending herself without weapons that there was no need for a guard in the room. The first two options seemed unlikely, which left the unpleasant conclusion that he was stuck in a room with a powerful magic user.

Lovely.

Countess Anise ignored his question, instead leaning over the table to grasp his chin. Her touch was gentle, but the invasiveness of the gesture had him pulling away – as much as he could when he was stuck in a chair, wrists chained on a short leash to the table. It was futile, really, and all he managed was a sharp jerk of his chin and a baring of teeth.

The fingers on his jaw tightened, almost immediately, in subtle warning. Countess Anise turned his head this way and that, her eyes raking over his face. They lingered on the pale, ugly scars of thorns grown in too fast from the softness of his scalp, on the lines of tension carved into his brow, on the crushed-grass bruise around his left eye.

It gave Canach the uncomfortable impression of being a cow at market. No doubt the Countess, with her fingers dug into his jaw, could feel how hard he was gritting his teeth.

“How did you get this bruise?” she asked, eventually, releasing his jaw. One pale, manicured finger came up to tap the underside of his eye, just on the edge of the faded discolouration. “You’ll forgive me for saying so, but you don’t strike me as the kind of man to start fights in a prison. Given your track record of running away from confrontations, that is.”

Canach took a deep breath, and tried to keep from doing anything stupid – like, say, attempting to bite a certain rich human mage’s finger off. “Why are you here?” he asked, in a voice inches from a growl.

“Ah, ah.” Countess Anise tapped the bruise, twice, before finally, finally pulling her hand away from his face. Canach couldn’t quite hide his wince, and the Countess didn’t bother to try and hide her smirk. “I asked first.”

Canach ground his teeth together so hard he felt sure she must be able to hear it. “Some of the Consortium– I’m sorry, ex-Consortium– inmates here seem to have a bit of a problem with me, for some reason. I can’t imagine why.” There was a throbbing starting up behind his eyes, and it wasn’t from the week-old bruise. “Why are you here?”

“Several reasons,” she said. She was still staring at him like he was some sort of rare, fascinating object. It was starting to make the back of his neck prickle – moreso than it had been already, anyways. “The only one that concerns you, though, my little sapling, is that I’ve bought your bond. I thought it might be nice to have a quick talk, before I collected you formally. To get to know one another.” Her eyes settled on his bruise again. “And to check you weren’t… damaged goods.”

The silence that followed was a physical thing, a weight in the room, claustrophobic in its closeness.

“…You can’t buy me,” was the only thing Canach could think to say, eventually. The words snapped out of him, shoulders rigid, something thrumming bright and terrified deep within his chest. It was suddenly hard to breathe. “I’m not a thing.”

Countess Anise laughed, openly, in his face. “You’re a prisoner in Vigil custody. Convicted of crimes against the peace, no less. I’d rather not be crass about it, but… I can absolutely buy you. In fact, I think you’ll find I’ve already bought you. You’re mine, for the rest of your sentence. Which– remind me. A life sentence, wasn’t it?”

Canach stared at her, wide-eyed, disbelieving, chest heaving with every breath.

“Hmm.” Countess Anise pursed her lips at his lack of response. “Regardless. Everything has a price, Canach. Even you. We can either keep that as a little footnote in what I’m sure is going to be a very productive working relationship, or… well. I’ve got a little time on my hands right now. I can spend it on reeducating you, if you insist on being a brute about it.”

With a roar, Canach hurled himself forward across the table. The cuffs brought him up short, of course, and peeled a thick layer of bark off his wrists to boot – but it was gratifying to see the brief look of surprise on the Countess’ face.

Only for a moment, though. Then the world disappeared.

His vision went first, swallowed into black, his hearing following seconds later. It was as though someone had plugged his ears with wool, except he couldn’t even hear his own heartbeat, or his breathing. He could still feel his lungs working though, too-fast with panic– and then even that went. The texture of the table disappeared from under his fingers, and even the scents and tastes of the room – the bitterness of his own green, snapped-stem odour, the rich musk of Countess Anise’s perfume – vanished.

Canach was left suspended in… nothingness. The word darkness didn’t quite do justice to the all-encompassing absence of anything. No sight, no sensation, no awareness even of his own body or its subtle processes. Just blackness, and silence, and the infinite drag of horrified terror at his mind.

It could have been minutes he hung there, consumed by the endless, gaping absence, or it could have been hours. Days. Years. It was impossible to tell, without anything to measure by.

Even his frantic attempts to count were useless. One stretched on forever, an eternity in a single word. Two and three passed by so quickly he nearly missed them. Four seemed futile, after that, but he forced himself to count it nonetheless.

The panic drowned him, after five, and the only thing he could think was, Pale Mother, please, make it stop.

When Canach came back to himself, he was hyperventilating, gasping for every inhale like a scared child. Sprawled on his chest across the table, with his arms wrenched out beneath him, the cuffs dug deep and painful into his wrists.

“That,” said Countess Anise, mildly, “counts as being a brute, you know.”

He swallowed, a slow and laborious motion, and heaved himself back into his chair – carefully, so carefully, so as not to give her an excuse to do… whatever she’d just done, a second time. “You intend to torture me, then,” he said, picking each word with the delicacy of a man removing ticks from his flesh. His wrists throbbed, dark, yellowish ichor oozing out around the cuffs. “Until I behave myself.”

The Vigil guards outside the room, he couldn’t help but note, were still very pointedly facing away from the door. Who was this woman, to be able to pull such weight within the Vigil? Certainly not any ordinary human noble. He doubted they’d have even let her in the room without an armed escort, if she had been – and they certainly wouldn’t be turning such an aggressive blind eye to a mesmer pulling tricks on a high-profile prisoner in the heart of their most secure facility.

“Don’t be dramatic.” The Countess smiled, a thin, lipless sort of expression that set every thorn Canach had on end. “As I said. If you intend to be a brute about things, I’m willing to invest a little of my time in teaching you to… not be. If you cooperate, though, then we can dispense with all that unpleasantness.”

“And what,” asked Canach, warily, his heart still hammering in his chest, “would my cooperation involve, precisely?”

Not that the question mattered much. There was little he wouldn’t do to avoid getting sent back to that awful, endless absence.

The Countess hummed, examining her nails in a poor pretence at mulling his question over. “I like having useful people to hand,” she said, at length, eyeing him from under her eyelashes. “And you, flower, seem like you could be very useful, given your… ah, unique skillset.”

A spymaster of some sorts, then, Canach surmised. That explained the cleverness, alongside the money. Nobles, especially human nobles, were interminably dull and stupid to a fault, in Canach’s experience. He wondered which had come first – whether she’d been born into nobility, and was the exception to the rule, or whether she’d acquired her wealth and title via making herself indispensable to someone higher up in the human pecking order.

She was watching him for a reaction, he realised, and schooled his face into a carefully neutral expression. No point in looking too eager to get out of this hellhole – no matter the strings attached. Or in looking too afraid of what those strings might be.

“…At the very least,” she continued, and he couldn’t tell if she’d found what she was looking for in his face or not, “you’ll be useful at parties. I’m obliged to attend, but I can’t stand talking to the great and good of Divinity’s Reach. Having a convicted criminal at my side might at least discourage some of the more irritating attendees to keep their distance.”

Canach couldn’t help himself – he barked out a laugh at that, grinning a grin that was more a baring of teeth than a true smile. “I do hope you can find something a little more interesting for me to do,” he drawled, pulling on his usual, careless mask as best he could. “I don’t enjoy parties, and frightening nobles hardly seems like a challenge.”

“So you’ll take the position?”

“Do I have a choice?” The bitterness was back in his voice. He couldn’t help it. No matter how interesting this woman and her bizarre job offer seemed, she’d bought him. And then tortured him into consenting to his enslavement, to soothe whatever strange sort of conscience the monster of a woman still had.

He wasn’t a big fan of being caged.

Countess Anise laughed again, and raised an eyebrow “Not at all. But I do like to maintain the illusion of a mutual business relationship, no matter how… messy the finer details are. And it might help your poor, wounded dignity to pretend that you’re doing this of your own free will.”

Canach made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “Illusions. How very true to form of a mesmer.” He hissed out a breath through his teeth, trying to keep his temper in check, to not let her know how badly she’d disarmed him. “Yes, yes, I’ll take your damned position. It can’t be worse than staying here.”

“I’m so glad we could see eye to eye.” Good gods, every time the woman smiled, Canach wanted to crawl out of his own skin. “I look forward to working with you, Canach. I think this is going to be a very productive… partnership.”

Canach bit the inside of his own cheek hard enough he tasted sap, resin-bitter and thick against his tongue. “I’m sure it will be,” he gritted out, only biting down harder when her smile widened. For one of us, he thought, but very carefully didn’t add.

Working for the Countess was, at the very least, going to be an interesting exercise in holding his tongue – in the face of, he suspected, severe provocation.

“Excellent. Guards!” she called, rapping smartly on the bars of the door. One of the guards, a young and fresh-faced charr, finally turned around to look into the room. It might have been Canach’s imagination, but the recruit seemed almost relieved – that the Countess was unharmed, or perhaps that the prisoner was still alive. It was impossible to tell.

“Canach is being transferred into my care, by order of Queen Jennah,” Countess Anise informed the charr, who immediately stood a little straighter at her tone. “Your superiors will have all the paperwork within the next twenty-four hours. Get him ready for transport – and for the gods’ sake, give him a bath and some new clothes. If I must play babysitter to a convict on the way back to Divinity’s Reach, I expect him to at least be tolerable to look at.”

“Yes, ma’am!” The charr saluted smartly, completely failing to hide her utterly bewildered expression. “Of course, ma’am!”

The Countess graced the guard with a smile, far more friendly than the ones she’d bestowed on Canach. “Wonderful,” she purred. “And Canach? Do try and stay out of trouble for the immediate future, would you? There’s a good boy. I’ll be back for you tomorrow.”

Canach, his wrists still throbbing in time to his heartbeat, still oozing sap onto the table below them, mustered up an exceptionally half-hearted baring of teeth. “I can’t wait,” he called after her. “Good talk, Countess! I look forward to our next one!”

Countess Anise neither responded nor looked back as she breezed out the room, and out of sight.

The Queen. Good gods. Canach leaned back into his chair, head spinning as the two guards came in to unchain his hands from the table. He barely noticed them tugging him to his feet, escorting him back to his cell. The thrice-damned human Queen. What in the name of the Pale Tree had he gotten himself into?