when they tell you you are made of stars, tell them you know.

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, Petrana de Cedoux, Benevenuta Thevenet & Galatea Lourdes + SPECIAL GUEST: YOU.
WHAT: A Wintermarch catch-all.
WHEN: Wintermarch.
WHERE: Kirkwall.
NOTES: Somewhere for me to put planned, closed threads! Hit me up on keanuleaves or libbitybibbit#8828 if you desire one.

Comments

Petrana; late in Phase One

[overharrowed]

Julius talks himself into and out of checking on Petrana several times before he actually does it. He is sure that someone as well-placed as she is will have plenty of people checking on her; on the other hand, she's still a rifter and, perhaps, more alone than she gives the impression of being. Ultimately, he decides, if he checks in and she's already in someone else's care, no harm done.

His knock -- knocks, really, go unanswered, and finally he tries the door. It is unlocked, saving him the decision of whether breaking in was entirely necessary. "Hello?" he says, as he lets himself in, "I'm sorry to intrude I was just ... concerned." The pause is less because he didn't know what to say than because he's surprised at the state of her, past immediately being able to hide it.

[ipseite]

Even in the winter chill, Petrana looks overheated, damp with sweat and feverish; frazzled and out of sorts, unable to quite be still, her bedding a mess as the result of her tossing, turning, tossing herself out of bed entirely and back into pacing, robe that she'd belted at the waist sitting oddly on her for having been haphazardly done. For a woman so ordinarily put together, precise, it is a marked departure from the norm and she looks blankly back at him for a long moment, then frowns, spins on her heel, striding back to the (open) window.

It chills the room, but it doesn't actually help worth a damn.

“I wasn't getting anything done,” she says, agitated.

This may not have been what concerned him.

[overharrowed]

"You aren't the only one," he observes, mostly recovering his regular demeanor, for all the worry doesn't completely disappear. "I presume you haven't been sleeping. Have you spoken to any of the healers, or..."

Julius' manner is gentle, but the truth is, he hadn't expected it to be quite this bad and he doesn't really know what to do for her. He isn't at all sure he can do anything, but it also feels wrong to just leave her like this.

[ipseite]

“I've had so much to do,” she says, vaguely, flattening her hands against the sill, frowning out at the Gallows below, and Kirkwall across the water—at first, her seclusion had been entirely unintentional, a mere side effect of not leaving her damned office. Now, of course, it seems more imperative; especially hearing the murmurs on the crystals, wishing so badly to wade into it and certain, under the circumstances, it can do her no good.

And no one else, either, more importantly.

She tilts her head back, presses her eyes shut—

“I read a letter,” abruptly, “from my husband. I'd it with me, when I came—I had it in my hands when I left him.”

[overharrowed]

"It distressed you?" Julius asked, unsure of his footing in a way he seldom was anymore. She was hard to read like this, not from craft but from agitation. He's very conscious of the likelihood of setting a foot wrong. "Can you tell me about it?"

[ipseite]

“He promised me this would never happen again,” she says, so calmly it can't possibly mean anything good. If Marius were here—

he is not. He is not.

“That he could—put me away! That a fever would never reach me again if only I were in a house, I suppose, and not a war-camp, and now I am in a stronghold and I cannot sleep,”

the high of the early days of the fever has not lasted, the falseness of that mood unable to stave off the place that it takes her to, dragging her bodily into grief that she has refused for months now to allow herself. She is furious and griefstricken and sick with it, and can do nothing, and there is no where to go, and nothing else to do but come apart at the seams and so she has, alone in her tower.

“I cannot sleep. When I sleep, you know, my daughter is alive. She will always be precisely that beautiful.”

Because she'll never be anything else.

[overharrowed]

"Madame Cedoux -- Petrana." He is not substantially less helpless than she is, even if he is less ill. "I cannot speak of your world, but I do not know of any place in this one where you would be invulnerable to illness. But I promise you, a great many of us are working to solve this problem. It is our priority. It is mine." Julius hesitates, then adds, "I know the illness makes it hard to sleep. Have you at least been eating?"

He doesn't know if offering to talk about her daughter will help or hurt. It's something he has no frame of reference for at all; family has always been at a remove, parenting yet moreso.