open | well i've lost it all

[coquettish_trees]

WHO: Lexie and the brave people who feel like maybe getting things thrown at them/being yelled at/cried on/some other flavor of ridiculousness.
WHAT: Breakup Drama ♫
WHEN: nowish (end of Haring)
WHERE: De La Fontaine apartments in Hightown
NOTES: if you're a melodramatic noblewoman with a sudden case of regency constitution clap your hands
[ if you want a certain flavor of ridiculousness, put it in your title or hmu on plurk (@shaestorms) or discord (shae#7274) ♥ ]



It has been three days since she returned to the apartments the Comte keeps for her and her sister in the middle of the night, and Alexandrie de la Fontaine has not emerged from her room. In fact, Alexandrie de la Fontaine has not emerged from her bed. The only mark of her continued residence is the persistent heartbroken sobbing from behind the door. It is largely quiet, muffled, a background sound to be filtered out like the ocean waves. It does on occasion become more energetic as some thought—new or revisited for the hundredth time—sets her off, or disappear entirely when the expenditure of it all sends her to sleep.

Meal after meal is brought, left, and found again untouched; the tea over-steeped, the coffee stale, and both quickly rendered cold, for she will not stand for a fire being lit in the hearth. (The first maid to find it silly and begin to kindle one in any case for her lady's own good received a thin bruise the shape of the side of an expertly aimed hairbrush and a tongue-lashing for her trouble. There have since been no other attempts.) Instead, she has wrapped herself in the covers of her bed, her attire unchanged since her return save to become rumpled, her hair slowly coming free over time as the pins vex her and are yanked out and thrown to disappear in the rug.

She is missing entirely. Silent on the network when she would usually be flip, absent from both duties and regularly kept company. Crystal messages go unanswered, and callers are turned away with the vague explanation that Lady Alexandrie has taken ill and is not receiving visitors; that they may leave a card, or a message, and she shall respond once recovered.

Some callers are, of course, slightly more insistent.

[ Here you still are! If you're not Evie and you're coming in the normal person way, Marceau is chasing after you right now in that sort of eminently austere way fourth generation lifelong butlers have. If you're a scalawag or something, she has a window. There's probably a trellis. We'll figure something out. Prose or brackets are fine! ]

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[coquettish_trees]

This, she had dreaded.

The question itself, the which she hardly knew the answer to as it was, and everything that came after. He had left her, in that he had absented himself as much as he had been able while still hovering on the side of the thin line between together and apart that had kept her, lonely as she had become, in his bed. Had shoved her away when the source of such had been revealed. But she had left him too, after her scathing deliverance.

And he had been right about Byerly.

Which she can use, now, to keep the truth—the more true truth—safe. To keep him safe. It is a strange thing to turn over in her hands, as she takes a moment to look away from both Lakshmi and the point of her finger, playing at being abashed for the scolding. To have in her grasp all she could ever need to both avenge herself in full and not only restore her place in society but launch it higher than she could have ever hoped to without such circumstance and have no desire at all to use it. She could easily paint herself the true innocent victim of a villainous qunari blood mage masquerading as human, and it would be readily believed. The anticipation bordering on eagerness with which everyone sat in wait to sit in judgement of the second son of Asgard was nearly palpable.

But the bare thinking of it makes her ill enough to drain some of the color from her face. Never. She would never. And so finally, quietly, returning to the beginning of the wheel of her thoughts, Alexandrie says "I hardly know."

[shri]

She doesn't think much of that answer, but it is expected. Brows raising, hands settling back to her side so she could smooth the material of her saree, flat and neat again to her thighs.

"If you don't know, then it was surely him. Unless you are the sort of female that strings men a long, I suppose." I don't think much of them, is not the thing that really needs to be said, undoubtedly.

"In which case, no, he is not worthy of you, unless he comes to terms with whatever it is that is making him act this an acceptable way to treat a woman."

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie is, in fact, absolutely the sort of female that strings men along. It is an easy and effective card she has in her hand to play, and one hardly gets far without playing the cards one has.

But she'd not tossed it on the table this time. She'd not have spent any time in bed at all if she had.

"And if I have matched him in unworthy behavior?"

She doesn't need to feign the reticence with which she asks that. It's not something she wants to examine, but better the examination turn to her than to what it is that is making him act as he had.

[shri]

Here is the great rub of knowing Lakshmi, apparently. For her - there is only wanting and not wanting, having and not having. To do and to not do. If she behaves poorly, it has only ever for a reason, and seldom just the sake of her own pettiness.

( Shouting at Knights, except of course. )

So it comes down to a certain point for her, "then do you really want him?"

Because she'd never lower herself, for a man especially, to any kind of personal pettiness or indecisiveness. Why would anyone else?

[coquettish_trees]

"As much as I have ever wanted anything," she says quietly to the cup and saucer in her lap.

Love, strength that brought safety, freedom. To have something real that would make her real, even if only in private. It had been everything she had ever shed tears over the want of, which meant that in one brutal moment she'd lost everything. Alexandrie feels like a keep gutted by fire, with only the stones of its walls remaining. From afar the same, but empty.

She had been a walking shell before, of course. Had survived before, will survive again. But she hadn't known what it was like to feel whole, then, and the knowledge is a weight she doesn't know how to carry.

[shri]

It is not that she is unsympathetic. She understands pain and misery, if not this sort of heartbreak, as well as another.

But she smoothes out her hands against her knees, falls her skirts flat in an idle pattern of thought. Young girls were such wretched things, in her opinion, they bent themselves over in so much pain when they did not need to.

"And what are you going to do about it?"

blows dust off this and polishes it lovingly

[coquettish_trees]

"Another thing I hardly know." Alexandrie taps the cup with her thumbnail, a sign of worried thought she would never have allowed herself to make back in Orlais. "It was only once before that I cared to make such amends," she says quietly, "to be so reunited. I had not the opportunity then," she hardly has it now, despite Byerly's shockingly unexpected reappearance, "and if I have one now, I have little idea how to take it."

She looks at Lakshmi with a small helpless smile. "Do I let him be? Write a letter? Appear at his doorstep to ask forgiveness? What should you do, Bai Saheba, if you had such a quarrel and such a terrible desire to mend it?"

holds it up like a prize

[shri]

"First steps, you get up, and you leave this bed."

Her hands lift, stepping up to Lexie's side with hands outstretched. Weathered, scarred palms offered up with loose fingers for Lexie to grip and take for herself if she wanted it.

"Then we get you ready to face whatever else might come. No plan came on an empty stomach and in bedclothes."

did... did we finish it?

[coquettish_trees]

If she is nothing else, the Rani Lakshmi Bai is a solid pillar of strength, with the ability to impart it as only a true leader may. And Alexandrie finds in the uncertainty of it all, that it touches the thing in her that is starved for hope.

She doesn't grasp after it. Even tear-stained and disheveled, once she has gathered herself she doesn't want for dignity.

But she does put the teacup aside and reach for the offered hands.

I think we did.... ???

[shri]

And with a sure grip of a soldier and mother, all at once: she lifts her up out of the bed.

There - that was better. And with a firm word, she guides her on, to get dressed, to get her ready for everything else that would come of the day and afterwards.