closed | your face has faded,

[coquettish_trees]

WHO: Alexandrie, Loki, Thor
WHAT: she did a thing
WHEN: *waves hands around* a semi-present time that works out
WHERE: Hightown
NOTES: cw for discussion of death and grieving probably

Alexandrie De La Fontaine does not paint portraits. She does not paint people at all. She does not even paint their presence; her landscapes are all wild untouched nature, even when there are walls or fountains or houses to be seen from where she sits. Those are either represented as something wrought by nature rather than by mortal hands—a wall becomes brush, a fountain becomes a pond—or removed entirely.

But there had been something, in her conversation with Thor on the coast. About the loss of the trees on the coast near Val Royeaux, how those trees perhaps only existed in one place now: on the wall of the Asgard home in Marnas Pell. That someday, without that painting bearing witness, no-one would ever know they had existed at all. Like that grove, his mother—and Loki's—no longer existed on this earth. Surely the House had portraits that would remember her, but such things were far away, and thus no shield against the last memories of her that her sons carried. That Alexandrie carried.

The particular smile of the Lady of House Asgard was not difficult to recall, if only because it had been the only one that had ever been called into existence at the thought of her entanglement with Loki. It had not been only that, though, it had been because it was genuine in a world that did not allow for such things. Easy, warm, kind. Knowing—especially with the accompanied raise of her eyebrow—in a way that evoked the feeling of a shared conspiracy rather than anything being held out of reach, small enough to make it feel private to whomever it was cast on. Her sons had been so easy to see in her, or her in them. They'd seemed split out like the bands of colored light on the other side of life's prism from the glow of her.

Hesitantly, in secret, Alexandrie had sketched.

Starting the painting had been hard. Fraught in a way that it had never been before. You cannot hide, in your art. Or at least she could not. To her mind, a dishonest subject with a guarded artist was no art at all, likewise both permutations of honesty and dishonesty, subject and artist. An honest subject required an honest artist, and letting people see such feeling in Orlais that was not about flower, or tree, grass or brook was such a danger to both herself and to whomever she painted that she could not bear it.

But the sketch had remained in her secret portfolio, and the thought had ate at her, and then, one morning, she had mixed her paints to the colors she recalled so well from that sidewalk café just before everything had gone up in flames and put brush to canvas.

And then, for the weeks it took to finish, she had suddenly desired to do little else but paint, once she had found that brushstroke after brushstroke she was painting over the blood in her memory. Over the horrible surprise of the look on Frigga's face when the sword had done its brutal work on her. Like instead of creation it was some kind of restoration of what should have been.

And then, the day she finished, the dreams stopped.

She doesn't sign it. But when it is dry she takes it, draped in fabric easel and all, to the music room of the Asgard home in Kirkwall. Leaves a note pinned there to let the brothers know it is for them and then goes out, her hands clasped around a cup of tea, to sit in the garden.