OPEN | Looking Down on Empty Streets

[coquettish_trees]

WHO: Lexie, Evie, Loki, Thor, Fifi, Gwen, anyone else who wants to deal with this actual mess of a woman (special shout out to anyone who has a four letter (nick)name apparently)
WHAT: Late nights, early mornings, a bunch of processing the horrible things that happened!
WHEN: Post return from Tevinter (so... mid-month?)
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: cw: a nice violent nightmare, general mental trauma. hmu if you want something special, will do brackets or prose as desired.

I. The Apartments (Day)

When Alexandrie is home, much of her time is spent laying on the chaise out on the balcony staring into nothing and hardly seeming to care about the oppressive heat that so irked her the month before. Her hair, if it is styled at all, is woven into a simple braid and pinned up, a far cry from the way she used to wear it. Sometimes she is a fury of diplomatic paperwork, sometimes she is repetitively and grimly throwing a knife into a target that is a new fixture in the area. Sometimes she will, all of a sudden, snap into the light and cheerful woman she was, although her laughter is harder to come by. Whichever it is, she is still welcoming of callers.


II. Hightown (Night)

She haunts the streets like a ghost; all loose hair and pale wan skin and simple white dress, dressing gown layered over it against the slight chill that still manages to cover Kirkwall by second or third bell despite the heat of the day. Often, she is in the memorial garden, sitting and watching the fountain or pacing the paths repetitively. Sometimes she makes her way to wherever the sea can be best seen. Like a spectre, too, she is gone by the time the sky begins to lighten.

Anyone else out and about in the dark hours?


III. Loki/Evie:

Smell. Noise. There's so much of it. The screams of panic, the mortal ones unlike any other, some far too high to have issued from fully grown throats. The ozone of magic ripping the air mixing with the choking char of burning stalls, the metallic smell of blood. Blood. Far too much of it. How can there be so much. The visceral nigh-unbelievable revulsion at how thickly it drips. It clings to her hands, sliding, sticking. The wink of sunlight on silver. The noise he makes around it is so desperately wrong: liquid, bubbling. The same thing, then, on a far slenderer throat. Sudden. Silver again, but streaked with red. Silver where it doesn't belong. Cannot belong. Disbelief. Overwhelming horror that grips so hard she is frozen and the sound, the sound that comes from them.

She never quite screams. While there is noise that accompanies Alexandrie's gasping terrified surges to consciousness, the shriek in her throat never truly makes it past the hands that fly reflexively to cover her mouth to fiercely stifle it as her knees shoot to her chest, her heart pounding like something is trying to fight its way outside of her. Sometimes they are clapped flat against her face; sometimes it's the side of her hand between her teeth, her jaw clenching hard enough to bruise, even to draw blood, although that is more rare. Always it is a desperate bid to prevent her horrified shuddering panic from waking her bedmate.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not.


IV. Thor/Fifi:

There is a small disturbance in the kitchens. The pour of water, the clink of metal, of china, rummaging through dry goods. Investigating will reveal Alexandrie, wrapped in a white silk dressing gown, her hair finger-combed and tied around itself in a simple knot, quietly looking through the selection of tea as the glyphs on the kettle do their work of setting the water to boil.

She looks tired and subdued—she often looks so, recently—but she manages a small smile all the same.

“Pardonnez-moi. Did I wake you?”


V. Gwenaëlle:

[ she has come looking for Gwenaëlle for a reason she can't really fathom. Perhaps it is because there is precious little in Kirkwall that is familiar and they had walked the same streets and halls, seen much of the same art, known many of the same faces, have the same mother tongue. Perhaps it is because Gwen too had been abruptly thrown from that world into one that so immediately included brutal violence and death that stood close enough to feel the hot splatter of it. Perhaps it is both things.

Whatever the reason, Alexandrie is knocking now on the door to the Provost's rooms in hopes of finding the small, concentrated, dark-haired woman, wearing a simple summer dress with her hair pinned up just as simply, the neck of a bottle containing something substantially stronger than the wine she'd offered at the Tourney in her fist. ]

Comments

[elegiaque]

( the pause is long, and the drink she takes more deep, and finally what she settles on is— )

In my experience, that's something one prefers to handle alone. He knows where I am; what I did.

( she hadn't guessed it was for his mother, but it explains a great deal about those terse exchanges. )

I'll let him come to me when he's ready to.

( it's not just for his benefit. gwenaëlle isn't sure she could handle the roughest edges of such a familiar grief, not when her own is—

too close, still. and she would have wanted it to be on her own terms; did want it to be on her own terms. the thought of pushing where she would not have wanted to be pushed is a discomforting, unpleasant one. )

[coquettish_trees]

[ there's something in there that's enraging. she's not sure what it is yet, only that it has hot spiteful fingers in her spine and makes her hear gwenaëlle's too-calm words without absorbing what they really mean. of an instant, lexie's speech is clipped, the loose drape of her arms turning hard and tight. ]

I suppose if that is what is best you are a better woman than I to provide it, for I cannot much longer stand any such waiting.

[ oh. that's what it is. it's jealousy, bright and savage, that has its claws in her. jealousy of the space of separation that lets gwen have such patience to offer, and simultaneous repudiation of the bare idea of finding such space to grant herself the ability to sit apart and wait. the thought that the very love she bears him renders her somehow less fit to care for him in this is an agonizing one.

(that, and, perhaps selfishly, letting him handle it alone means that she will continue to be left alone in her fearful grieving.)

she has dug the heels of her hands into her eyes angrily, as if through main force she could stop what stung her eyes from emerging.

why the fuck was it she'd let herself feel things again? ]

It is so fucking lonely, Gigi. Lying next to him is agonizing. Neither of us can sleep, we can barely speak around it, he will not let me lay the lightest touch on even his shoulder without shifting from it, and yet somehow being away is worse, and all the while Emile is missing and may well be dead and I may never ever know what has become of her and I cannot stop dreaming about the man I killed and I should have stayed in Val Fontaine and drunk wine and remained ignorant of all of this and let my parents marry me off to someone I should not have let myself love at all.

[ beat ]

Or become a Chantry Sister.

[ she puts her face in her knees with an aggrieved noise and holds her hand out blindly for the bottle. ]