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! ]

Comments

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.