faderift | OLD YOU IN THE GARBAGE, NEW YOU IN DISPLAY CASE

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OLD YOU IN THE GARBAGE, NEW YOU IN DISPLAY CASE

WHO: Byerly, Alexandrie, Petrana, Sidony...and Helena???
WHAT: Going to reconcile a married couple
WHEN: Prior to the battle
WHERE: Orlais, in Val Fermin
NOTES: This post is part of a player plot leading into the Battle of Ghislain

Two months ago, Comte Michel du Val Firmin found a new lady-love. It's a familiar sort of story, one that hardly even raises an eyebrow in Orlais - the Comte and Comtesse have their lives taken over by duties; their relationships cools, their love is forgotten; one or the other or both meet someone a touch more comely, a touch more exciting. For the Comte, that someone was a lively peasant woman named Eloise, an educated literate young lady with curly hair and strong opinions.

Truly, this wouldn't be grounds for any attention at all...save for the fact that Eloise has strong opinions about world politics, and a strong willingness to voice them to the people around her. Including the Comte. Who listens to her. And so now, on the eve of a major battle, he's debating withdrawing his troops, suddenly (under her influence) troubled by the questionable morality of sending common people off to die.

Byerly Rutyer got word of this looming disaster through a dear friend of his*. And so he recruited a few diplomats, friends, and complete oddballs to help him sabotage this turn of events...by ensuring that the Comte's heart is taken away from Eloise and is instead returned to the Comtesse.

*Monarchies tend not to like nobles - even nobles of other countries - turning all democratic. The peasants tend to get ideas. So this info got slipped courtesy of a few attentive folks down south.

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They are at the Alexandrie Lady's estate. So very fancy, these big houses and gardens with mazes and so many things. Like a fairyland from story books.

Helena is lying on her stomach next to a pond. The clothes she is wearing, perhaps a little smarter than what she normally wears in Kirkwall, are stained with grass at the knees. Earlier she had somehow taken something that might look elegant on someone else, and managed to make it feel awkward and uncomfortable. Now she has pulled part of the layers away, leaving her with something like a sleeveless vest, and the looseness of it reveals stretches of scars across her shoulders, though the rest of them are hidden away.

Her fingers lightly dance on the surface of the water, prompting ripples across the surface as she watches the fish, the lilypads, and moves only at the sound of footsteps approaching, hand going to a knife she has hidden away—

and then she relaxes. "Hello."

Sometimes a walk is all that is needed to clear one's head, and Sidony is more than happy to give herself that time. She might be here to aid with a failing Comte and his Comtesse but that does not mean she should not allow herself some freedom to make herself more comfortable; how often will she be able to spend time away from the warfare to enjoy Orlais? She had come to the Inquisition to do some good, of course, and she was excited to make a start, but...

Well, a little holiday here and there would hardly do her any lasting damage.

Spotting Helena, the odd little bird they have with them, Sidony gathers her silks and the tails of her skirts and makes her way over, barely flinching when she sees the other woman shift and move. Let her reach - she might not have much in the way of her own defence but she doesn't think the other woman would actually harm her.

Slowly, she lowers herself to settle down beside Helena, a smile on her face.

"I hope I am not disturbing you."

All these fancy ladies and fancy places. She is not so totally sure why she is here, except maybe in case they are needing sharp eyes and knives. For just in the case, yes?

Her hand drops back to the water, tapping to get ripples. "No. No disturbing."

A look back to Sidony, gaze sharp. "This is strange place, no? Very fancy."

It's likely a good thing to have additional protection, of course, but Sidony isn't sure about Helena. She doesn't know a great deal about the other woman, only that she's a touch odd and very unique - but if she has been invited here by Alexandrie and Byerly then Sidony has no reason to complain.

She's sure people would say much the same about herself. A strange, unique creature from the midst of Nevarra, appearing suddenly to take part in the surgery of the Inquisition. To practice what she wants to practice without the interference of her parents.

"Good." She makes herself comfortable, tugging her skirts around her. "It is quite a rich place, yes. Are you uncomfortable?"

Are you uncomfortable. Is polite way of observing you are not belonging here, with some people. Helena slowly pushes herself up, though her head still hangs low, at an awkward angle, as she cranes to look at Sidony with a flat, interrogating gaze.

"I am most comfortable, thank you." The rhythm of the words, their emphasis, is off. Stilted and unsettling, perhaps, with the delivery. "My family is very wealthy, in our home."

It's an overt lie, to the perceptive.

Sidony, at least, does her best to try and not appear like she is being intentionally cruel; she had grown up in a society where you had to be careful with your words and who you said them to, so she has been doing her best to make sure she does not step out of line. It's a difficult thing, but she had learned from the best and her words are gentle and soft.

"I am glad to hear it. I admit that I sometimes find myself a touch overwhelmed. My home in Nevarra was handsome, but I think myself completely outmatched here." She strokes over her dress again, brushing off some imaginary dirt.

A pause, a glance, but a smile.

"Is your home as lovely as this one, dear Helena?"

"Very lovely. Everything is made of polished marbles and oak. We eat the fanciest foods, oysters and chocolate milkshakes and cakes with gold dust, and wear the largest diamonds and fine silk."

Her smile, though, turns mischievous. "Is okay. I will help you in this fancy place."

"Chocolate milkshakes? I do not think that I have heard of such a thing before. Your homeland must be truly rich indeed, madame, for there to be such things, especially with golden flakes to go with them."

This is a game, of course, but Sidony is enjoying herself. It makes something soft settle on her features, her eyes looking out over the gardens around them.

"I thank you for your kindness. Perhaps you would be my partner for any events that might take place, to ensure my comfort."

This is not entirely what Sidony had imagined when she had joined with the Inquisition.

It is true, of course, that Byerly had arranged for a touch more study, the private kind which she might not speak of to anyone else, so she has that in hand - quite literally. She did not, however, think that it might be that talents outside of her medical knowledge might become a necessity, but here she is trying to rediscover a Comtesse's inner beauty. It's a novel task, the kind that might have bored her to tears if she was still wrapped up in Nevarra with a mother peeking over her shoulder, but with the freedom of the Inquisition and her own decision making...

Well, she is more than content to go on a journey to Orlais to help out a woeful woman. It wouldn't be right to neglect her.

She had brought with her a trunk of clothing to entice the Comtesse with, a mixture of something a little daring and something a touch more conservative. The hours before actually meeting with the Comtesse herself has Sidony hanging up the dresses, stroking her fingers down over the fabric and tilting her head, pondering the shape and the colours. They're all rather dark, she can admit that - blacks and reds, wine and blood, with emerald greens and deep violets - but she thinks they ought to work anyway. It's not often the colour that men notice, after all, but what the colour shows and does not show.

After a period, she settles on a chair, leaning back with one leg crossed over the other, deep in thought.

Byerly wanders in at some point, quiet enough not to disturb her in her thoughts. Perhaps quiet enough that she doesn't even know he's there. He examines the clothing she's brought, a slight frown on his face as he evaluates the cut and quality of the fabric.

There's so very much you can tell about a person by their dress. Wealth is the obvious one, of course, but there's more as well. Preferences, mores - connectedness to the fashion scene - particularly for young women, you can even get a bit of insight into their relationships with their mothers just by examining her gowns.

"Lovely pieces," he comments, a remark that would be idle and even pleasant if it wasn't calculated to make her jump with its suddenness.

Sidony had done what she could to bring a range of dresses; it would not do for her to bring things that would flatter her and her alone when she was intending to spruce up a Comtesse who had a husband with a wandering attention span. No, the low cuts and flashes of skin might work for her, on occasion, but for a woman who already had a husband and might not want the rest of the world to see what belonged to him? A little daring, maybe. A step too far, possibly.

She's about to get up and start moving the dresses around, considering them with a touch more thought - she really does need the woman's measurements - when she hears Byerly's voice and she does jump, twisting in her chair and narrowing her eyes as she glares at him. Had it been anyone else she might be more sour, but she has a fondness for him.

"It wouldn't do well for me to bring my more hideous of dresses, would it." Pushing herself up, she walks over to hover at his side. "Was it your intention to scare the life from me, Byerly?" And she offers a hand for him to kiss. Be polite after such a scare.

It has been months since Alexandrie has been home. Not home, the apartment in Kirkwall, or home, the estate she all but lives at now with Loki, but home. In other days, they would be preparing to go to join the Empress and the rest of the court at Halamshiral soon. The Comte and Comtesse de la Fontaine still are of course, as is her brother Matthias and his wife, their two children, but that preparation is one that Alexandrie will miss this year.

She wanders the mansion she grew up in, its grounds, in a dreamlike state. Here the tree she had leapt from in an attempt to break her own ankle once Evie had broken hers; here the molding on the wall she had measured her height against when she still grew. Here where she had written letters containing all of her young and foolish heart, here where she had learned to sing, to play the piano forte. Here where she had wept, had learned to lie. It hadn't been so long, but it felt like forever all the same. Felt like a gulf that could no longer be bridged, the other side only viewable from afar, never tread again.

Then there were the gardens. How many hours had she spent within their paths? And how many with him?

It's still there, the old oak with its sturdy branches, with the swing she'd clapped delightedly for the hanging of. The numerous tosses of its ropes over the branch it hangs from, most of them for her amusement. Sitting there now, her hands finding purchase on those ropes amidst the climbing rose vines that twine around them, their petals dropped for the coming of winter, she can feel the tingle of hands on her back, often more gentle than she could allow herself to think on.

She will sit for a while there, eminently findable. And then she'll kick off with more energy, a kind of determination to leave the ground behind. To finally touch her feet to the leaves, or to the sky, her skirts fluttering with the movement.

From up in the branches, Helena watches, gaze sharp and curious. This is the sort of life that belonged in story books, for princesses, and now there sits so near her the woman who this made the life of.

Helena moves slowly, near silent, until she is hanging upside down from the branch, knees hooks around it as her hands and hair hang down, and she looks at Alexandrie.

"You are looking lonely."

Startled, Alexandrie can't help but laugh, short and abrupt, at Helena's sudden and unconventional appearance from above her in the tree. The question that follows it touches a little close for comfort. Is she? Perhaps, but it is a loneliness for want of something that is gone now—that must be gone now—and moreover she does not want to be lonely.

"Bonjour, cherie!" she exclaims instead, wiping away whatever it was that had made her self-indulgent melancholy so obvious on her face. "A fine climbing tree, is it not?"

And evading her words, this odd princess. Helena's head tilts to the side as she hangs, watching intently.

"Is good tree. Rotting branches have been cut away, I think." Curling upwards, she knocks on the bough, and slowly lowers herself down again. Wiry, this one. "Sometimes the dead parts need to be cut away."

It's far too incisive an observation, and lands in precisely the same place as the first question had. Alexandrie's gaze sharpens for a moment as she re-files Helena as a force in her own right rather than a curiosity. And moreover, one of those forces like Thor who have the natural temerity to be so forthright as to cut right through the careful weave of falsehood and deflection she had so intently studied how to form the warp and weft of.

"In winter, how can one tell which are dead? What if the branch is simply... waiting, and to cut it would injure the tree?"

This is a foolish question, and a foolish place to ask it, but even so she looks at the other woman with the guarded mix of hope and sorrow with which one views a soothsayer after asking a question they can already feel the answer to. Tell me something else.

Edited 2018-11-12 17:59 (UTC)

"Some thing are meant to be cut in winter. Then they are ready for re-growing when the right season comes."

Helena grins, then, looking at the Alexandrie girl. "Trees can't scream. If it is injured," oh well, she suggests, a little tilt of her head. "But you can wait until dead branch falls on someone's head. They might scream. Cannot grow new head like tree grows new branches."

Sometimes it is interesting to challenge and to shock, to try and understand and categorise the reactions she gets.

Oddly enough, that all seems to be precisely what Alexandrie needed to hear. She kicks off the ground in a slightly more sprightly fashion, looking amused.

"Mais non! We cannot. It is for the best, I think. How horrible it would be, to be wandering about with a very small head as it grows back."

That makes Helena laugh, a rough and almost hiccuping thing. "You are strange lady. This I like."

"I am," Alexandrie agrees cheerfully, with more sincere assertion of self than might seem warranted.

"I think," she says, letting herself swing to a natural stop, "I shall go and see if I can find a certain place in the woods. Would you like to join me?"

Helena looks to the ground, and pulls up to the bough again, unhooking her legs so she's holding on with her hands, and then dropping to the soft earth to land in a crouch.

"What is the place?" She unhooks her bow from her back - why not use the opportunity to hunt, after all.

"One which my sister and I used to frequent, when we were very small," Alexandrie explains. "I know not if I shall still be able to find it, but I feel myself desirous of looking."

She eyes the bow in Helena's hands, wondering briefly whether or not Felix—their gamesman—would be cross if she allowed the other woman to hunt their land without letting him know, but ultimately deciding that she could sweet-talk him later as she always had. Her smile twitches. Perhaps he would be cross if she did not immediately take liberties upon her return. He had always enjoyed pretending to be in an official huff with her.

"No does or young bucks, cherie, if you please," she says with a nod before turning to take the path that will lead them into the wilder parts of the estate.

A long look.

"Should I ask yous before any shooting?"

Something in her tone is deeply uncooperative. Why so fussy, this noble lady? Just because she can being, Helena suspects.

Alexandrie raises her eyebrow and, with a glance at Helena's shard hand, inquires with a carefully amenable manner as they walk, "Have you had cause to keep a herd before?"

"No. Deer are wild. Not needing human interfering. Same as rabbits."

Maybe she is being just a shade judgey. "Have you ever needed to hunt to eat, before? Needing to, not for sports."

"No," Alexandrie replies, looking entirely untroubled by that despite briefly dipping into the sort of ultimately useless pitying expression the well-meaning well-off have when confronted with another's hardships.

"But that is not what you do now. There is food enough at the château; if you take a deer now, you do so for the sport of it alone."

At that, she shakes her head.

"No," Helena says, head hanging slightly to the side. "Relying on others for giving food, no. They can take away as easy as they give. This is... preparation."

"It is still relying upon the De La Fontaine household for food if you hunt our land," Alexandrie replies mildly. "This is not wild unclaimed forest we step into. My family and our household steward it. It is not as if we keep the deer within enclosures, keep the rabbits of the forest in hutches, cage each bird and feed them by hand, but Felix knows how the herds move within the forest, knows their numbers, and keeps watch on their health from afar. They are our deer, on our land, and your hunting them with our permission is the same as you sitting at our table. Your hunting them without our permission is the same as if you were to take the pearls from my neck."

She pauses, and then raises an eyebrow to qualify all this.

"By the laws of this country, if not the greater laws of nature."

Yes yes yes, laws. Helena shakes her head in a slow, side-to-side wave.

"This only matters if you are catching me," she says, her smiles mischievous. After all, she has done many murders, and is not being arrested yet. Law frowns upon murder, also.

No need to say that. "I do not think you would know if poachers took a deer. Even now, if you were noticing it would be only because we are having this talking."

"Steal often from your hosts, do you? When it would be gladly provided if only it were asked?" Alexandrie lifts her shoulders lightly and then drops them, as if she is not all that invested in having an answer to either question, that lack proven true enough as she continues to speak without waiting for one. "You are right enough in consequence applying only to those who are caught at what they do and in that I would hardly notice." Although the gamesmaster undoubtedly would. "You shall do as you like, I imagine, but it shall be plucking plants from a kept garden rather than foraging."

Then, as the path nears the treeline and becomes unpaved trail, "And rather ill-mannered in disregard of the very small favor I have asked in return for the run of the land. Simply care for it as we do, that it might continue to be bountiful, and you are welcome to its fruit."

He watches her as she swings. Which is perhaps an unpleasant thing to do, isn't it? Not many ladies treasure the thought of their ex-lover leering at them as they idly enjoy the pleasures of their childhood home. No matter who added that particular enhancement to that home. As a matter of fact, most ladies would probably run shrieking from the thought, lest said ex-lover have a knife he's about to use out of some vengeful impulse. Because most ladies are sensible.

But here he is, leering, like a demon or a ghost of the past - or, no, that's too grandiose. Like a mouth-breathing pervert out to get a glance at a girl's knickers. So he decides, after a moment, that he simply can't go on like this utter monster. And so he shucks his coat and shirt and charges right past her, diving into the ice-cold pond spread before the swing.

If she is surprised, which she is, mildly, it is only because it is as if she has summoned him with her thoughts. For the rest, well. On the subject of sensibility, Alexandrie is not most ladies. Her shriek has little to do with who it is, or where he has been, or what he was doing (or how long he has been there doing it, if that were something she had been privy to,) so much as she knows that pond to be preternaturally cold even early in the season, and would also lay a guess that he had not brought overmany changes of clothing with him—if indeed Byerly had overmany changes of clothing—and the party is, of course, this evening.

"Sortez de là, Byerly!" She demands loudly as she hops down from the swing, her lips pressing together against the laughter that would only encourage him. "Pensez-tu que tu êtes une carpe?"

Already, she is wondering if Mathilde might re-fit a pair of Matthias's trousers for him.

Edited 2018-11-13 02:45 (UTC)

He responds by flipping over back and luxuriously back-stroking out further towards the center of the pond. Maker, it's freezing. He might die. But he doesn't let his smile flag for a second.

"Lexie, my dear, how fine the water is!" he calls. "Come and join me?"

"I most certainly shall not!" Alexandrie retorts, her hands resting on her hips as she makes her way closer to the edge of the pond. "You know quite well it is stubbornly frigid in there save at the very height of summer." When, for a bare few weeks, it grudgingly turns to something like sun-warmed silk even into the evening, and is eminently perfect for...

Which he knows quite well because...

She hadn't actually thought about that before saying it, but she is now. Damn. Rather quickly, then, "and if you do not come out immediately you shall catch a chill, and perish from it, and I shall not mourn you in the slightest!"

Nothing is quite so satisfying as a job well done, particularly one with so many moving parts—as strange as it feels to be essentially congratulating herself on ensuring a married couple copulate, she is glad to feel it might yet all come together. If they do. Good grief, how terribly crass; the wine that she's finally more than just tasting must be going to her head.

The party itself had been a delicately choreographed dance performed by puppets unaware of the pulling of their strings—a guest-list Petrana had methodically tailored to show the Comtesse to her best advantage naturally, without requiring an unsubtle hand. People she would naturally be drawn into conversation with; who share or admire her interests, who admire her, a warm audience to reflect her glow and allow her husband to see her not through the tired contempt of familiarity but instead through their eyes. See her charm and her cleverness reflected in their pleasure in it, and to look closer for what he might have come to take for granted.

With the guests of honour secluded in their guest-room, she sits by the de la Fontaine's pond with a pilfered bottle of wine and takes her shoes off, exhales deeply, stretches her toes into the grass, and thinks for a moment of—

Not home, any longer. But there's a bittersweet taste to it that she cannot quite put aside. At least she might have done some good here, if she could never have saved her own marriage. This is the sort of thing she'd imagined they might do together, lifetimes ago; now she thinks, perhaps one day of Ferelden, of Julius.

Perhaps she should just take the win.

“To all of you,” she says, to no one in particular, and drinks.

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OLD YOU IN THE GARBAGE, NEW YOU IN DISPLAY CASE

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open; the de la fontaine estate

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open; de la fontaine estate, post-party.