faderift | persephone sits in a courtroom dress as green as summer trees her lipstick red as blood

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persephone sits in a courtroom dress as green as summer trees her lipstick red as blood

WHO: Gwenaëlle Baudin, Thranduil, assorted guests.
WHAT: It's a nice day for a white wedding.
WHEN: Haring 30th / Wintermarch 1st
WHERE: The de Coucy residence, Hightown.
NOTES: The OOC post. Your character wasn't in the chapel unless you play Romain, Coupe or Legolas. Post co-authored with

rowancrowned. Questions section of the OOC post still open! This is a mingle log; top level, tag amongst yourselves, hit us up if you have particular needs or desires.

Despite the events of the previous month, the winter's afternoon wedding of Gwenaëlle Baudin and Provost Thranduil proceeds as planned—or at least, close enough that any last minute discrepancies are invisible to the eye of oblivious guests (and indeed the bride, having taken approximately zero interest in the planning). In the ongoing absence of a suitable Chantry, the ceremony itself takes place in the modest chapel within the home to a select few witnesses hand-selected—chosen mainly to avoid any untoward rumours that it might not have been done properly, including the acting Viscount, the Gallows Forces commander, and a handful of others whose stature within Kirkwall lends them the sort of credibility this wedding is in dire need of being lent.

With the ballroom ripped out and redesigned for another purpose, the estate doesn’t possess the space to host the number of guests invited to the post-ceremony fete, instead making use of the courtyard in its center. Guests are shepherded there, and are not entirely left out of the wedding itself when they are joined by the happy couple to publicly sign the legal documents some who've not previously attended weddings between people with money may never have seen before. To ward off the midwinter cold—to varying degrees of success, based on one’s proximity to them—braziers have been set up at intervals throughout the garden everywhere but the space cleared for those moved to dance, and servants in de Coucy colors bring round trays of small, hot food and enough drinks to stave off the worst of the chill.

The decorations betray the groom’s tastes over the bride's. Holly and juniper and other such evergreens make up the majority of the arrangements, bright red berries a better ornament than the inexcusable expense of hothouse flowers. There is the underlying reminder that both halves of the couple are Inquisition members, in the smart dress uniforms that half the guests wear as they mingle with the better part of Kirkwall society.

This is a pageant, the diplomatic arm of the Inquisition flexing the agreement made with the Rifters and also the normalcy it seeks to restore. But it is a pretty pageant, and an easy excuse to wear something stunning and dance and eat food purchased with Orlesian coin—and, perhaps, to enquire about making a donation to the Inquisition in support.

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Weddings are not Gwenaëlle's strong suit, her own least of all. The veil lasts long enough for everyone to get a good look at how pretty, and then is carefully removed from the points of her bridal crown and replaced by a more manageable soft, fur-lined shawl around her shoulders in an acknowledgment of the chill that her dress is not. Without the slight haze of sheer fabric to hide behind, a great deal of work is going into looking as pleasant and polite as she can manage—

she at least doesn't look entirely miserable, if occasionally somewhat hunted surrounded by all of these people, a mercy that has much to do with the wine intermittently appearing at her elbow. With her hands hidden in her shawl, she can fidget to her heart's content unseen, or curl them around cups of hot mulled wine, or decide in that winsomely newly-wed way she has about her that it's actually urgent she be holding onto Thranduil's arm for the sake of peace and not punching anyone.

It's going so smoothly she's almost suspicious of it. Ask her to dance; this once, she might not decline.

Edited 2018-12-27 22:02 (UTC)

Romain has kept merely a light hand on the tiller of the day. His grandsons out of Orlais is... best, even if it's perforce temporary, and they seem to have the bulk of his attention at the party. Thomas is beginning to look a young man but Raoul is still clearly a boy, and inclined to see what he can get away with if left to his own devices. As for Aurèle, his wedding present to Gwenaëlle is, evidently, attending while not making her decide how she feels about him by intruding upon her directly. A statement, but not one for his niece in practice (if not in fact), and almost certainly not one that Aurèle composed himself.

But for all the duke's attention may seem to be on his grandsons, his granddaughter has had the bulk of it all day, though she may be the only person in a position to notice. He's always just looking away when she looks at him, or angled in a way that he can watch out of the corner of his eyes (even if the mask means he might not be looking).

Eventually, he is slightly more direct. Romain makes his way over to them. "Well. You do look very snug; I almost hate to ask you for a dance." Almost.

The headdress she wears is almost as elaborate as one of the masks she left behind in Orlais; it's all the more striking, now, that after so long without them she lacks that slight paleness above the mouth that she once had that tends to mark the upper-classes. The sparkle of it somewhat distracts from the lack thereof in her somewhat flat affect, but the smile that he prompts is small and warm—

“If you hated to do something then you wouldn't do it,” she says, offering him her hand. “You aren't just distracting me because you've misplaced Aurelé's boy, are you?”

If she sounds unconcerned, it's because first of all she doesn't think that's so, and second of all, she'd probably still be unconcerned if she did. A rambunctious boy is the least of their worries.

He takes her hand with a faint smile, visible below the line of his mask. "Raoul is not misplaced, he's taking a brief rest from the festivities." In other words, Aurèle had taken him for a time out, of sorts. "I'm glad you agreed for them to come, it will be useful on a variety of fronts." For her, if she wished, but he was resigned to the fact she might not; for him, for the Charniers as a whole, it would do.

As he led her out to the floor, he added, quieter: "Courage. You're mostly through it." The day, at least.

For a moment, she feels the nearest she thinks she's ever felt to Annegret (so many years after her death, and how like the two of them), who must have gone out to dance on Romain's hand at her own wedding, wearing these same jewels (and, still in its velvet box, the pale and pretty mask that matches them)—she wonders if Emeric would have seen a memory in her, if he'd been here. If he would have been wistful, in that godawful irritating way he had, or if it'd have stung.

She puts it out of her mind.

“I'll say hello before we retire,” she says, which feels like a concession although she can't be sure quite to what. “Which won't be nearly soon enough,” a little tartly, and only enough under her breath that she's unlikely to be overheard by anyone else.

(Her skirts are far too heavy to allow her to stand on his boots, the way she did when she was half so high as she is now, but she does have the fleeting impulse.)

She can catch a glimpse of his smile at that below the mask. "I remember having much the same thought at mine, though it was a very different type of day. It was still quite a long one."

He can't help thinking of Annegret, and of Calanthe, given the occasion. He is doing his level best not to think of Emeric at all.

"I think you've done well, though. It's made the statement it was meant to make, and we've made it fairly late in the day without anyone coming to blows." His tone was light enough that if she knew him less well, she might miss the joke.

Her arrival's punctual — and not enough so to afford free conversation. That must be deliberate.

The ceremony is what it is: Words and promises that she'd prefer to care less about. This is a contract, and Maker knows whether it will hold; however steady a heart, the Chantry's not stilled for half a decade.

She keeps posture, exchanges courtesies, fulfills the necessary role of prop dummy. How different all this must be from what they wished it (how many the absent faces). Even so. If Thranduil squawks a word of complaint for his own harebrained idea,

"Eat something,"

There exists a tipping point for wine. The hand at her elbow is stiff, the face above it thinner for absence. Hello, niece.

It's incredible that Gwenaëlle's mouth barely moves at all when she says, “And where the fuck have you been?” having apparently been freed from the obligation of greetings or smalltalk by the selected opening gambit. It's rather more sincerely meant than any of those things would have been; this absence has bothered her the way an absent tooth might and with less explanation.

She had written, Guilfoyle said, but he would not say of what. Her uncle, haunting the tower; relaxed, now, drinking his wine and periodically redirecting Raoul Charnier back towards Romain in a way that she's certain probably irritates her grandfather, just on principle. She might have known Coupe were back from the way the tightness between his shoulders had released, if she had had a moment to see it before the chapel, where she could hardly react.

A tray of food goes by. She takes something from it only to be spared the indignity of having it pressed into her hands.

"Orlais."

She says, which is as true as it's not an answer. Her chin tips aside, considers the yard. What ass decided to hold this in winter is —

Something she knows perfectly well. A distraction, at any rate. She's no stranger to the spaces that some leave behind; how much may curl, rot within. Half-empty: The glass curled between thumb and finger. Half-full: The pause before,

"I would not have missed this."

It's difficult not to think of those whose absence she feels as keenly as she might have done Coupe's when it's underscored that way—all of her parents. Morrigan, who she had wanted to stand in their place.

“I wouldn't have blamed you,” she says, dry. “I'd have liked to.”

Miss it, she means, but—

that she wouldn't have grudged it wouldn't have made it easier to bear.

"I know." She does, most of them do, its own small miracle if their distinguished guests haven't clued in (too caught up in the scandal of it). "You did not do this for each other."

The slight twist of her mouth aside; the precursor to a smile.

"But for a future, perhaps." Too uncertain a thing, always — if it isn't the war, or the whims of the Fade to separate them both. They've spoken around it before. Around, and little more. For a future, and its constants, "That is what they all want."

Those guests. A future, or a piece of it; to stay ahead of a problem, to not be taken for surprise. To own the day's gossip before it might be turned aside. Or,

A bit of hope, too. You're allowed that, at weddings.

Gwenaëlle's lip curls, involuntary, before she stops herself; arranges her features into a studied neutrality. It would be better if she could look more the blushing bride—a little sweetness about her would suit that, the implicit promise of a future where things like this will still matter—but a lot of things would probably be better if someone else were doing this. In a perfect world, it wouldn't be necessary.

A server appears, discreetly, at her elbow; she strongly suspects that they, at least, are paying close attention to her expressions, and she warms her hands around the wine that she takes with rather more enthusiasm than she had morsels of food.

“Would that they were prepared to do a little more to get it,” is all she says, eventually, instead of perhaps fuck them or do they deserve it? which is, she knows, no sort of metric.

It isn't as if she does.

One such intermittent goblet of wine is delivered by Alexandrie, her other hand curled around a similarly filled—if not as ornate—cup of her own.

"To have wed to you twice!" It is light, gay, and spoken softly for only the two of them by a woman seemingly as remote from the crumpled creature last seen forlornly occupying her rooms as she has become from the feckless thing blithely waving a corkscrew in Wycome. "It is enough to make one almost believe he is actually aware of the worth of the treasure he has."

She leans to gently tap her head against Gwenaëlle's as she offers her ferried prize.

"It looks well on you, cross as you may be made by the fuss."

“He's a peacock, he likes the attention,” she grumbles, tilting her head very slightly (and indeed most expertly) to avoid the dangling jewels of her headdress tangling in Alexandrie's hair or mask. The goblet functions as a barrier over which she might regard this glittering assemblage.

Crossly.

And then, “Do you think it's an ill-omen to have worn my mother's headpiece?”

The Vauquelin marriage was many things, aspirational not among them. (Mother is a protean word; there are so many things she might mean by it. In this case, it seems unlikely that she speaks of Guenievre Baudin.)

"Hardly," is the reply. Alexandrie turns to look out over it all—well, most of it, she skips her gaze over an entire section—and sips her wine companionably. "If it is, you have already started your marriage and I imagine any ill omens for it should have had to occur then to be effective, although I am no witch and hardly know of how such things work. I think it perhaps more a statement of how you came here. At such moments it is difficult to not see how one has been formed and thus brought to this moment, no? Can you see it occurring in any other way?" A tilt of her head, the rest of her elbow in her free hand. "And are you not happy with it?"

She observes Gwen's slightly narrowed eyes and the set of her mouth behind her drink and her lips curl in a little smile. "Generally speaking."

“Am I not happy with it.”

But there is no witch, and—

She presses her lips together against the impulse to let them fall into some childish pout, to look in some direction and imagine that Morrigan might be that way. She's a woman grown and twice-married to the same man; she doesn't need her hand held. She isn't going to fall apart just because Morrigan isn't here to watch it happen, even if she'd wished otherwise.

It had been time for them to go. She can't grudge that. She misses them both, and terribly, but she writes her letters dutifully and it will do.

It will do.

“It had better serve its fucking purpose,” is what she settles on, taking a drink.

"If it does not, we may both go to the Chantry and complain, the which you know me to be quite competent and overwhelmingly belligerent at." Alexandrie raises her eyebrows archly at herself, and rests her lips against the mug to breathe in the curling steam for a moment.

"I think it shall, however. You both look breathtaking, you have a great many influential witnesses who are being expertly plied by the hospitality of your grand-père, Knight-Enchanter Shivana is placed perfectly to be the startlingly tenacious advocate for love in the faith that he is, and your lord husband is charming his way through everyone in attendance more quickly than I am attempting to drink through your wine." Said as though she means she is barreling towards drunkenness, although that is more a fond wish than any truth.

"And, soon enough, it shall run its course and you shall find out how the surprise we have labored on so serves its fucking purpose." She smiles mischievously and bats her eyelashes.

(And hurts. And excises that hurt quickly and mercilessly to stuff it away.)

Edited 2019-01-07 06:38 (UTC)

“I don't know if his hip actually needed all of this recovery time, or if he's just been thinking I might behave better for the incentive.”

Does Alexandrie have any idea how long it's been since Gwenaëlle's been fucked.

(She might. It seems they have fewer secrets between them every day.)

She tilts her wine around her cup, and then—

“I thought it'd be worse for you if I had him barred.”

They aren't speaking of Thranduil any more.

She's opened her mouth to say something sly about Thranduil's 'incentive', and what manner of behavior might be considered good for such a thing. Shuts it again.

"But of course!" She exclaims lightly, knowing very well that Gwenaelle will know it for a construction. (How few of those they have between them now.) "If you had had the Lord Provost barred, we should not be having such an lively event, and I should be ever so bored."

Don't.

It would have been worse. She doesn't want to see him, but nor would she want him kept from anything. He is alone now everywhere, perhaps even in his own home. Thor knows, certainly, but she can't imagine the elder Asgard (the only? No. Loki is as much Frigga's son as he had been) has any greater love for the Qunari than his brother. Is there as much silence between them as there had been after Minrathous? What is it, to be a shapeshifter with such control and to find yourself changed without your say-so?

She left her rooms and is here, masked and painted and smiling. Let that be enough.

"I am being good, Gigi," says Alexandrie, quiet now; speaking to the cold air, the clear sky, the barren waiting trees. "Let me be good."

Edited 2019-01-08 18:26 (UTC)

Enough, she thinks. Enough.

It had mattered—does matter—that Alexandrie not see callousness in his presence. Gwenaëlle has taken so little interest in what is apparently ought to be the most important day of her life that it wouldn't have been an unfair assumption, that she hadn't thought; that she had gone on taking no interest. And for her own sake, she had, but she had thought to rescind his invitation as she'd (flatly and unhappily, pointing the name out with a letter-opener she held a little too threateningly) rescinded Lakshmi's. Thranduil would have obliged, she's sure; neither of the Asgards are essential to this endeavor and did their attendance matter much, it'd be the elder brother and not the spare.

...but she is Orlesian, still, for all her mouth might have found a happier home elsewhere. Kindness is a knife, where they were forged. This kindness would wound far more than cauterization. So she gives the cool, clean kind that they know better—

“Dance with me, then, good girl.”

With feet as light as heavy hearts.

And he does. Ask. Maybe not in as many words as Might I dance with the bride-to-be?, should she be preoccupied, but not necessarily as rude as to simple waltz in and whisk her away.

Or maybe he's relying on the fact that he looks enough like the groom-to-be to his advantage.

"May I?" He offers a hand to her, and the question to her conversational partner, if there be one. If not, then the question is hers. He's been learning the steps, enough at least to not have to resort to Ye Olde Woodelf Antics to have a good time.

Just as well. Legolas isn't exactly dressed for Woodelf Antics. A little too refined and fancy for that, for all that it might seem fitting on him. The better part of the celebration thus far has been spent trying to figure out how to field (or avoid, he's good at avoiding) questions common of second marriages, which probably hasn't helped him settle any, and if he seems antsy--

He's probably just hungry. So. Dancing it is.

“You must,” she says, lightly to paper over the strain—she is trying to look at least a little less openly relieved to have a preferable excuse to disentangle herself from dull conversation. Thranduil is rather in his element tonight, but it isn't Gwenaëlle's (by any stretch of the imagination) and mulled wine can only get her so far.

At least she hasn't had enough of it to weigh down her feet, yet: light on them, and clever enough to guide without leading, keep them moving in the right direction and improvise quickly around any gaps in his knowledge of social dances of Thedas. The evening is unavoidably Orlesian, but many of the guests are Marchers; it's hard to predict where a given beat falls.

“Thank you,” under her breath. And then: “My mother—my elven mother—I think she'd have liked you, if you'd met her.”

(She had two. It's a long story. Or: a short story, with a sad end.)

Legolas is light enough on his feet that improvising is smooth when it needs to be, if he can't catch the proper steps in time from watching others. Ballroom dances have never been his strong suit, no doubt due to a scarcity of ballrooms in Mirkwood.

Still. A dance is a dance, and he enjoys dancing. He has enough enthusiasm, and shows it, for the both of them. Which would be an immense faux pas if it is in fact unseemly to be enthusiastic about Orlesian wedding dances. But he'll take the chance. It's been far too dreary for far too long.

"Would she?" He hums a little, thoughtful and to the tune of the music. "I have not oft heard that I am very likable."

He is, of course, not very serious about that. Though even if he were, it would not colour his words with anything like scorn or dissatisfaction. The only thing that would do that is if one were to tell him he couldn't climb trees anymore.

Which. Did happen while he was recovering from that nasty burn. So.

"..I am sorry that she could not make it." Perhaps he doesn't know the full story, or he has heard only rumors, whispers here and there. Perhaps it doesn't matter. "Maybe I would have liked her as well. Though they are strange elves that live here."

He's also a strange elf though, even by Middle-Earth standards, so he really has no room to talk.

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persephone sits in a courtroom dress as green as summer trees her lipstick red as blood

gwenaëlle | ota | let us know if you want The Couple

The groom is welcome to threadjack

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I THOUGHT I TAGGED THIS I'm the worst

up 2 ur discretion kate

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threadjacking grooms also accepted here

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d-d-d-dance.. pappy can threadjack if he wants his wife back

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