[i]A collaboration of humor, desperation, hope, family and love. All brought to you by the creative minds of [@Chrononaut] and the Schaft. Enjoy...[/i]

After Vurwe snapped from the realization the armored monstrosities actually exploded, she had some doubts. Perhaps now was not the best time to confront Jorwen. Maybe she should go back, call Jorwens wife a cow, and go back to sleep, wait for all this to blow over. Then a shard of metal ripped through her dress following another "boom" out in the distance and she instantly became a 11 on a 1/10 scale of how pissed she could be.

She walked over to Jorwen, pointing angrily and glaring. She gestured to Gordo, who said, "Oh." and coughed into one meaty fist. "You, troll man, no know music. Gordo think dumb."

Vurwe nodded in what seemed to be approval.

Jorwen's brow was aching with how hard it was pinched together and his eyes were tired and angry slits in his face. The copper smell of blood was in every lungful of breath, he had to step over men he once knew and newbeard lads he'd never get to. He finally found his sword and lifted it up to tent his fingers over the pommel and heave in a sigh that tasted like death. It was only fitting that the next thing he heard was Vurwe and the biggest Dunmer he'd ever felt looming over him step up behind him. The big lad said something he more than likely was payed to say and Jorwen only turned his head, his words smoking out of his mouth as he looked over his shoulder at them, "D'you have to?" Jorwen sighed and frowned, "Be a cunt? Morning, by the way, you're welcome for the bed."

"You and your superfluous daughter were making a racket in the night and I wrote a letter, in response." she jabbed a scroll at Jorwen. "I want reparations! The letter also has a footnote about the bed." 

Gordo nodded along to each word, "Gordo read letter! Very petty! Gordo approve!" 

Vurwe groaned, "I pay you to approve!"

"Gordo approve that!"

Vurwe leaned over to Jorwen, "I taught him about the word approve and he's been excited about it. I think he may be touched."

"Mm." Jorwen grabbed the scroll and tucked it in his belt, "Good kindling." The smallest smile on his lips. Say what you wanted about Vurwe but if she meant half the things she said, she wouldn't have stuck around at all. There was at least an ounce of niceness in there. Maybe.

"Each day should be a new lesson, eh, lad?" Jorwen said, when Vurwe told him about her new stint as a teacher for the big mer.

"Mm," Gordo nodded deeply as if Jorwen had imparted great wisdom, "Gordo approve of notion."

He turned to Vurwe, "You came out of a scrape like this alive while a lot of unlucky others didn't." Jorwen shook his head, a frown returning to his face, "There's your reparations. 'Course, we could go for some eggs later, when I feel like eating again." His eyes scanned around the docks until he saw two men with a big Nord held at the ankles and under the armpits, limp and sagging like a bundle of rope. One of the men had the big man's mail shirt thrown over his shoulder, another had his axe in his hands while he was carrying him. White-Eye's things. And they carried the man himself, of course. He set off that way, "Come. Bring your Dunmer."

Vurwe frowned, "Where are we going? My dress was ripped by one of those gargling monstrosities turning into a damned fireball! These are expensive! I'm going to need to find a tailor! Does Skyrim even have tailors? Where's your daughter anyway? She better not be dead."

She looked to the Nord Jorwen was likely looking at and squinted, "Is he dead?"

"He look dead?" Jorwen said. The answer was before them in White-Eye's good glassy eye and slack face. Then he looked to the red noses and rosy cheeks of the two men carrying him. He planted his fist right into the nose of one and crunched it bloody and crooked in the man's face while Gordo took the obvious hint of violence and lifted the other man over his head and threw him into the icy water. The look on his face after doing it was of stone, like he threw men off docks most mornings. He approved. Cleftjaw's stomping feet brought him over, barely breathing any harder.

"Your daughter!" Jorwen looked over his shoulder to see Cleftjaw cradling Solveig's body, her nose was crooked and the bottom half of her face was a mess of blood. She was limp and it was all he could do to not just fall to his knees and die. "She's alive, but... she needs help." A shred of hope and he looked to Vurwe with pleading eyes.

Vurwe looked into Cleftjaws eyes and stared. She'd seen eyes like those, years ago. The fragment of a memory unfolding into being. It was a cold night and she had been walking in the dark hallways of her family's keep to look for more kindling for her boudoirs fire. There was the sound of footsteps. Then a yell. She ran down the hall to her father, Ganron's, chambers. There was blood leaking from under the door and when she opened it, he fell to the ground. There was a knife in his chest and it seemed to have pierced a lung. She screamed and knelt down. There were cuts all over his body, it seemed he had been stabbed by more than one assailant. She knelt there, crying, when the guards finally arrived. No healer had arrived in time and by the next day Vurwe had taken over as Eldest of the Highorin line. He had looked right at her with pleading eyes.

She knelt down next to Solveig, "Gordo, hold the girl, I don't think that man can keep at it." Gordo took over for Cleftjaw. She placed three fingers on the girl's face, a faint glow of light tracing along. She rubbed as much blood away as she could with her hands, making sure that any healing she had done was actually working. Gordo was eventually instructed to adjust her broken nose back into place. 

Jorwen breathed a sigh of relief and looked at Vurwe. There was a distance in her eyes for a few moments that he'd never seen before, and then she set to work. Gordo lifted Solveig from Cleftjaw's arms and the man sighed a heavy breath, his body sagging all at once. Jorwen was like a doting mother and Gordo had to shrug Solveig away from his probing hands. Her face seemed to piece itself back together, but the damage was done. Scars that would've taken days to form crept across her skin like the roots of a plant. Her face was different, but it was still his daughter's. Her nose still had a crookedness to it and a slot was left in her lip towards the corner of her mouth from which dripped a scar that curved to fork at her chin. She remained asleep still in Gordo's arms before Jorwen held out his own. Gordo put Solveig in his arms with such gingerness he never would've thought the big mer had. He looked down at his daughter and then to Vurwe. "I-I don't know how to thank you, lass."

Vurwe gave him a icy look. Her eyes looked like they had been tearing up. "We'll talk about that later. I'd start with finding a good tailor."

"I've a needle and thread handy in the warehouse." Jorwen looked down at his daughter and gave her a gentle hug, "Walk with me." And off they went, leaving Cleftjaw to take care of White-Eye's burial, away from the mass grave the others were sure to go in. They found themselves in the big empty room and Jorwen retrieved his things from the little lockbox he kept his sewing tools in. He returned to where Vurwe and Gordo sat next his daughter, laid out on his bedroll. He didn't know how to phrase it, and had been working on how he'd say it while he was walking over here. Of course, he'd made little progress, so he decided to just come out with it. "I'm going to need you to change."

He looked at the rips in the skirts and the frayed stitching. There was no way he'd be able to fix the dress with her wearing it without stitching the thing to her. He offered her his cloak, though the thing hadn't been washed in a while, it was the best thing for the job. "Take this."

The Altmer swiped the cloak from his hands, judging it with a upturned nose and a wrinkled brow. She found the most isolated hole in the warehouse and changed, returning with the dress folded in her hands like she was going to offer it to a knight. She had pulled the cloak around herself as tight as she could and had cotton trousers. She quietly thanked Phynaster that he had seen it in his grand wisdom to make it so brutally cold in Skyrim that she'd need to wear trousers.

It was an hour before Jorwen came back. When he did, he unfolded the dress to let Vurwe appreciate the work. He didn't think it was too bad, but Vurwe always seemed to find the shit in everything. But he'd given his word to the woman who helped his daughter. "I'm no altmer tailor but I owned my own shop, what, a thousand years ago?" Jorwen mused, "Feels like it, anyways. It'll serve, and I owe you."

"It's...fine." Vurwe didn't really feel like making crucial judgments of a man who saw his daughter horribly wounded earlier, even if she thought harsh, brutal judgments would improve his tailor work. She would have to find someone whose hands were delicate, like a young boy's to get the precise movements required to fix the filigree. Then she could tell him he was horrible at it and he'd believe her because he was twelve.

"Where did you learn it?" Jorwen nodded to Vurwe's hands, "The magic. Healing." He sat down on a crate, his feet next to his daughter and he smiled down sadly at her. He could scold her when she was awake, but now she needed rest. How much, he didn't know. He'd seen wounds like hers, given them, and it could be a day or a week. He looked back to Vurwe, Gordo jutting up behind her like a spire of rock.

"Self taught. I would have my cavaliers bring to me those who injured in their work. Eventually I got it right. If I didn't, I sent them back with a sack of gold and pointed them in the general direction of a more practiced mage." Vurwe recalled that one of them had came in with a missing leg and she'd immediately shooed the armored men who had carried him in off. She had them work as horseshoe makers for six months. The only reason she had let them go back to their careers was that they were making shoddy horseshoes. Horse casualties had never been so high in Firsthold.

"Quite a thing to teach yourself." Jorwen chuckled, "The only thing I ever taught myself was how to drain a tankard as fast as I could and then play five-fingers after, you know the one." And he splayed out his fingers and mimicked stabbing between them with a knife. "Young man's games, the kind you play when you're craving the rush of battle but have to settle for drink and being stupid. Good at it, o'course, you don't get good at it for no reason. Reckon some of these scars are from myself." He laughed. Even if Vurwe didn't, it felt good to talk to someone.

"You have a game where you stab at your own hands?" she asked, incredulous.

Gordo looked dumbly at his own fingers, "Gordo need these play..."

Vurwe scoffed, "Violence must be in their nature. You can tell by the sloped foreheads and the hair. Distant relatives of bears. Or Dragons." she recalled that the "Dovookan" or whatever ridiculous title he had been given after having revealed to have the soul of beings literally filled with a love for destruction.

"I won't disagree, it's a stupid game." Jorwen shrugged, "What about you? What kind of games does an altmer play?"

"A game sort of like chess. There are black and white pieces and the objective is to acquire more surrounding territory than your opponent." Vurwe stared off towards the ceiling. "It's sort of the Thalmor strategy, now that I think about it."

Jorwen grunted and smiled, bitter, "You stick yourself in wars as long as I have and you'll see that's everyone's strategy. More power a man has, the more shrivelled his good bits get." He shook his head, "Maybe Skyrim'd be a better place if the Dovahkiin had died with Helgen."

There was quiet between them. Gordo looked at his fingernails and narrowed his eyes at one, Solveig slept soundly, Vurwe scowled at nothing in particular and Jorwen watched the goings on in the warehouse. The groans of the dying and sobbing of the wounded were almost as bad as the eerie silence the dead left. Jorwen cleared his throat and looked back at the group, "You never said why you were in Skyrim." He said, then he furrowed his brow, "Does it have to do with you having cavaliers? You're not a damned Queen or something, are you? A Direnni, or...?"

"Queen? I was a Duchess. Is that how it works out here? You have one leader? If I were a Queen they wouldn't let me out here." she said. She folded her arms, thinking she perhaps had said too much. "I have my reasons."

Jorwen frowned at Vurwe. She seemed like she caught herself and shut herself up. "A Duchess? That like a Jarl?" He asked. He nodded appreciatively, so Vurwe had a title, she was nobility. That was a bit unexpected, he always just thought she was stuck up because she was an altmer. "Well, you're important, then. I suppose we all have our reasons for being here. I used to be a tailor in Whiterun, tax man loved taking a Stormcloak's shop from him. Now I'm here. Nothing too special about it, but there you go."

"I was. Now my relationship to the courts is...complicated." She fidgeted around, deciding to change the subject drastically. "So, who was your-" she paused at that syllable, realizing she was about to commit social class implosion, but it was too late. "first lover?"

Jorwen coughed and looked around, awkward as Vurwe looked. "Well..." Jorwen shrugged, "There was a woman legionnaire. It wasn't love, but we'd see each other often. She was in a different cohort than me. After the battle of Anvil, I never saw her again. I still don't know what happened to her. When I came back from the war I met Halla and we each fell for the other. I was young, strong, a warrior to my bones. A damn idiot. But when I held my daughter for the first time..." He smiled down at Solveig, breathing slowly on his bedroll, "Maybe I'll move far away from Skyrim when this siege is done. Take Halla and Solveig, if she'll come with me. Got to go to new places to be a new man, places where they've never heard of Red-Bear." He snorted. He could see it now, a small house in Cyrodiil. Chopping wood in the front. Maybe he'd open up his own tailor's even, get back to the needle and thread, do something better. He chuckled softly to himself, "You? Some smooth-palmed page at court?"

Vurwe fidgeted with her dagger's handle "A servant? Absolutely not. There was a Skywatch heir when I was much younger. It didn't...quite, work out. Namely, his father had decided to not allow him to take succession. The courting was seen as less useful by my father."

"Less useful?" He frowned at that, not knowing how he'd react if Solveig brought home a man. Judge him by his usefulness? No, not unless he was a drunk and a womanizer, but he trusted Solveig to turn them away. He couldn't find anything to connect with in that. He figured having your every whim be controlled by the politics of the realm could certainly make someone as prickly as Vurwe. "You never felt... like you should've had a say in it? The boy wasn't a lackwit, you just never hear of anyone putting down a bond so easily otherwise."

"What? No, that would be betraying my family. Is that what you backwoods savages do? Do things against your family's whims? No, I don't need a say in it." She remembered that she had rather liked the boy, but choked down most of the resentment. Most of it. "Maybe you haven't heard of it because you haven't been important enough." 

Jorwen shrugged, "If anyone tried to make me leave Halla, I'm not sure I would like to be important enough for that." Jorwen was surprised. Pleasantly. Vurwe still had an outside hard like iron and as spiny as a briar, but it was easy to forget she didn't just pop out of the air like that. Being the head of a family at her age and leaving it behind for whatever reason was a damned jarring change to make. Maybe she wasn't too far past getting to be friends with. At least, in the sense that one builds calluses from hard use. "Here in Skyrim, you can love who you like. People can either respect it, and if they don't, they can do something about it. Family included. Any friend or family worth a damn will love you no matter who you choose to love yourself." Jorwen shrugged and raised his brows, "No one place has the same views just as no one person can, but that's the way I've seen it."

"Well your views are wrong. And if you mentioned anything I said to anyone, I'll slit your throat." Vurwe said, doubling down. "Anyway, we should be getting about and seeing what the others are doing. Being dead, most likely."

"I tend to hope for the opposite." Jorwen chuckled awkwardly, of course he knew people never got what they hoped for often. "And your words are safe. Be seeing you." He looked down at Solveig and back to Vurwe. "I won't forget this. You have Gordo, but I'm here if things are fixing to get bloody." Despite the nice gesture, and he really didn't expect much more, she simply nodded and walked away, her dress folded in her hands. Jorwen watched her go, a frown on him like he was faced with a good riddle. Between Solveig and Vurwe, maybe the only differences were titles and the ears, a little bit more venom than the other. He smiled sadly down at his daughter. After the siege, they'd move on to better things, new places, and they'd catch up. He hoped.