OLD YOU IN THE GARBAGE, NEW YOU IN DISPLAY CASE

[bouchonne]

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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open to all

[strangel]

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."

open to all

[indissection]

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.

open; the de la fontaine estate

[coquettish_trees]

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.

open; de la fontaine estate, post-party.

[ipseite]

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.