#so how do they handle funerals for like. fledglings. low ranking assassins even. do they have them for each one individually

[cafepietra]

Hi! 10 or 35 for the Rook story time prompts?

omfg hi, thank you so much for the prompts! i love all the stuff you've been posting btw

i went into this with the intention of doing both, but uh. the first one got away from me, so we'll go with that i guess! cw for referenced child death.

Rook Story Time - 10. Rook attending a funeral.

The scent of incense sticks to the roof of Simonetta's mouth.

She's spent enough mornings half-dozing through regular services that the heavy, strangely sweet smelling smoke is already familiar to her, but she's never had to put up with it for as long as she is today. And with every passing moment stuck in place while the chanting drones on, she can feel it snaking its way around her, embedding itself into her clothes, her hair.

A wall of taller mourners blocks her view of the real ceremony ahead, Viago at her side. Whose funeral is this in the first place? Did she ever know the answer to that question? A Crow, presumably; the rest of the chantry is packed with other Crows, solemn but strangely detached. The turnout tells her it must be an important one, but boxed in here with no view and nothing but perfumed air and disembodied voices for company, it doesn't matter.

Maybe if she closes her eyes she can fill in the gaps left by the bodies around her with her own imagination. At first she tries her hand at inventing a corpse to fill the urn: a daring, handsome Crow who died an honorable death, taking his final contract down with him. Someone worthy of all of this ceremony. It leaves her cold, and her imagination narrows into something smaller, something more real. She finds herself dreaming of the older fledgling who had gently corrected her stance the first time she held a practice foil in her hand.

An elven girl with a gentle smile and seemingly endless patience, one who was easily six, seven years older, surely with better things to do than take a skin and bones urchin freshly dragged in off the street under her wing. But there she was, not a thought for concepts like rivalry or pride, an anchor for a child who felt herself already going adrift. Until-

The chantry air is cloying and thick in her lungs.

It happened without commotion, without explanation. Just the day before she had been trailing behind her like a shadow in the courtyard, and now...nothing. Not even her questions were being answered, just met with a mixture of pitying glances and hard stares, if they were acknowledged at all. All she had to cling to were a few overheard whispers, snippets she caught whenever someone didn't think to look out for tiny ears.

"Should have known to look out for-"

"Bound to lose a few with every crop."

"...Would have happened eventually, that one was always..."

"What a waste."

Her parents were gone before she was old enough to remember their faces, let alone their deaths. They existed, hazy and incorporeal, in idle imagination and nowhere else. Death until that moment had been an abstract: something to be mastered and harnessed in the service of a still far-off future. Not something that happened to the people around you.

She remembers the way she had clung to herself in a hidden corner of the training grounds, the dread she felt at the thought of being caught crying while everyone around her carried on. The way she had swallowed long gasps of air to push the tears down to the pit of her stomach, down where she could build a fragile, shaky dam-

She is brought back to herself by the back of a hand nudging her shoulder; Viago is motioning that it's time to go. She is on her feet before he can vocalize the command. Outside in the sunlight, where the air is no longer too thick to breathe and smells of bright, inviting things, she inhales a long breath and swallows it.

Rook can't put her finger on why, years later, watching pyre smoke build past the roofs of the highest buildings in Treviso, these are the memories her mind calls forth, but wistful is the only word she can find for what she feels. She envies the child who could bring her tears to the surface so easily. But the dam is complete now, and she finds that no matter how hard she tries, all she can manage are the breaths.

The scent of burning wood sticks to the roof of her mouth.