open | neither snow nor rain

[nadasharillen]

WHO: Nari, Lexie, you~
WHAT: Guardian catch-all for some ladies. (Well, one Lady and one elf.)
WHEN: The Present!
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: prompts I have promised people will be appearing below as I get to them!

Nari

I.

With the sleet keeping everything near-constantly coated with ice, Guardian is hardly the right month to be jaunting about between the Gallows towers and the towers that hold the massive machinery designed to raise and lower Kirkwall's immense chain net. The massive machinery that hasn't been used in two decades, ever since Viscount Threnhold had used it to strangle Orlesian trade and the Divine had ordered the city's Templars to 'convince' him to lower it. Threnhold's successors had been loathe to use it with such a tangle in the recent past, and so its mechanism is full of two decades of largely untended metal shifting, weathering, rusting in places.

The winter seas are rough enough that an assault by sea isn't likely, but the thin dark Dalish woman had shrugged and said that the Archon's Palace raising into the sky above Minrathous hadn't been all that likely either, and so here she is, on her way to the Chain tower, a pack of tools slung over her back. A pack that has been repaired several times, and by the look of it is about to need one more: something heavy looking is inching its way out of the back of it with every step she takes. Won't be long before that's lost. Hope it's not important.


II.

What Guardian is the right month for is being here near the hearth in the Hanged Man's taproom with a hot mug of mulled wine and a mallet, tapping chairs back together and listening with quiet amusement to a harper on one side and two tipsy men one-upping each other outrageously in order to try to take the same woman home on the other.

The important thing, really, is that the weather is outside, but the entertainment isn't unwelcome.

“Are you listening to this?” she asks, looking up briefly with a crooked grin spreading across her face, “The taller one has gone from fisherman to ship's captain in the space of five minutes.”


[ or something else! ]


Alexandrie

Winter here has not brought the lovely romantic fluffy pristine snow she'd dreamed of. It's desperately horrible in Kirkwall, and what work she can do from home she does from home with great relief. Unfortunately there are still meetings to be had, new correspondence to discuss, and every so often new books, scraps, and sheafs of paper arrive for the Inquisition that are in need of translation. All these things are in the Gallows, and so, begrudgingly, is Alexandrie.

She can be found now, looking far less disgruntled than she actually is, sitting at a table in the library with a letter in one hand—at which she is frowning with extreme delicacy—and a painted porcelain cup of tea in the other, her maid doing a spot of embroidery close enough at hand to refresh it when that becomes necessary.

“Ah!” she exclaims quietly, her glance warm and pleased over her painstakingly painted smile, “C'est parfait. Have you a moment to spare?”


[ ...or something else! ]

Comments

[coquettish_trees]

"Taking lovers has always been a matter of course," Alexandrie replies dismissively, "Make inquiry to your clever cousin if you have forgotten."

Then, her hands holding her elbows, she switches horses mid-ride again near as quickly as he has been. "Did you trust me, once?" Is the quiet inquiry.

[bouchonne]

He's quiet a moment. The answer, of course, is yes, and she's a fool if she thinks otherwise. She saw how besotted he was with her, back then. The penniless miserable unwanted fool, struggling to make his way, suddenly wrapped up in her golden life. He'd have done anything for her. She was like a font of all the joy he'd lost - even wounded, even disgraced, she was like Andraste to him. His trust had been as absolute as his love. He had, after all, been painfully, laughably naive back then.

He isn't now. It serves him well as a spy. Perhaps, he thinks, cruelly, it's a very good thing she's so close to Colin; she'll drive the kindness out of him yet. Unfair.

"The question, Lexie," he responds, watching the whiskey in his glass as it catches the light, "is whether I can trust you now. What do you think the answer to that question is?"

[coquettish_trees]

She is more worth trusting now than she was then. Now she has no scheme for him, not even one being put off and shoved to the back of her mind as she slowly stopped wanting it. Had stopped caring what her position at court was, who smiled, who frowned, who whispered, what they said of her. She had music, and stars, and a young man with glorious eyes who would do anything to make her laugh. Who would let her stick her feet in the pockets of his coat when they got cold from the dew soaking through the thin silk of her slippers.

He had done nothing, then. Nothing but smile at her sleepily and reach to gather her and make a contented noise when she'd wriggled her way over to seam herself to his side that had made her feel warm and soft and safe. And then frozen and terrified in equal measure at her own failure to guard herself again. It had been stark and overwhelming and consuming, and she had slipped free, and she had slipped away, and she had destroyed him.

But before that, she had loved him.

And she loves him now.

And she is still afraid.

"No."

[bouchonne]

He shrugs at her in response, the gesture taut and sharp. "Then why do you act as though I do? Or should?"

A hand run through his hair dislodges the lock she'd fiddled with earlier. It falls back into his eyes. His other hand curves around his glass, tilting it to swirl the whiskey around - an absent gesture, a nervous tic. But he does give little away. All of these gestures could be those of a frustrated ex-lover, just as easily as they could be those of a suspicious spy.

"You've already ripped everything private away from me, so now you want to invent more secrets to uncover. Is that it?"

[coquettish_trees]

She's lost her steam, now. And the thread of the fearful anger that had brought her barging in. And the lofty manic confidence that had come with being so sure that she could make herself stop caring, knowing it was only she who did.

"No." It is a defeated and forlorn sounding thing.

[bouchonne]

"No?" He holds the whiskey, now, like it's evidence, like he's leading a landsmeet and this is what he uses to prove his opponent's wickedness. "Then what? What is it you desire from me, Mademoiselle?"

[coquettish_trees]

The question is like a blade, and Alexandrie flinches away from both it and the answer that still rings in her chest. She wishes she'd taken him up on the drink. She wishes she hadn't heard the two of them talking at all. That he'd never come to Kirkwall, that she'd never left Orlais, that she could take time in her hands like a Dwarven clock and turn the gears backwards and rip out every stitch she'd ever sewn.

"Protect him, then." It grates out of her, wanting to be other words. Ones she doesn't deserve to say. It's a useless ask; she knows well enough he will. Byerly can't help it, that thread is woven into him hard and tight. "If you must be so placed. If I am to be rendered unable to."

[bouchonne]

"Rendered unable." The phrase is exquisitely dry.

Perhaps he is being unkind to Lexie, in truth; perhaps she doesn't deserve this. She has not, after all, done anything particularly wicked since the time when he wasn't furious with her. She's just made a choice. And this impulse, to preserve Colin's innocence, isn't a wicked one, Maker knows. And yet he finds himself with the unkindest thoughts in his heart.

"Why not become one yourself? A spy." His smile is flat. "If you're so distressed about being rendered unable to help."

[coquettish_trees]

"I should trade myself to the Scoutmaster for him without hesitation if I believed she would accept me," she replies, her tone both wry and resigned. "But I think she should not. I imagine it roundly believed by now that to take me up would be to call to heel a dog with two masters."

She can't say it isn't so. While she is hardly beholden to Tevinter itself, she has a tight and fervent grip on the strangeness of the truth between herself and Loki. She owns nothing so large as the secrets of his she keeps, one of which would doom him to Tranquility or the hangman's noose in the South and one of which near certain exile from the North, both fates she has chosen to share. In exchange for that trust of necessity, she would give him anything, and so they are knit together.

But she looks at Byerly levelly, when she says so, when she continues. "The Scoutmaster would have little reason to trust such a one. Who knows what other strings I would pluck, whilst under the auspices of the Inquisition."

[bouchonne]

"Then why," he asks, plainly, cruelly, "are you here at all?"

[coquettish_trees]

"I said as much," she returns tightly. "To beg of you—" never mind that she had come demanding, "—to find a way to prevent this life—" her life, "—from passing to him."

[bouchonne]

"Here, Lexie. Not in this room - in the Inquisition."

Beg of him, indeed. What an absurdity; what a joke.

"What is the point of someone who serves a different master?"

[coquettish_trees]

"Who has come here thinking only to serve this organization?" she asks in return, "I had come to both rejoin Geneviève after the years of our separation and explore the opportunity to make an advantageous match within a rising power that makes equal what has not been. Here, I might think to marry the son of a Duke. Find foothold in the families of the Marches. Enchant the heir of an Antivan Merchant Prince."

She'd not planned for the second son of a Lord Magister. That had come as a surprise entire. (Nor, for that matter, had she planned on ever hearing the voice of Byerly Rutyer again.)

"I have stayed because I have seen with my own eyes what is being wrought on this world, and on my country, and I can no more return to the house on Lake Celestine to pretend I know not what is coming to pass than I can put the blood I spilled in Minrathous back into the man it belonged to. What have you to say in answer."

[bouchonne]

"That you're screwing a Vint."

His voice is clipped. He takes another drink.

[coquettish_trees]

"You came to serve the Inquisition as a result of whose bed I warm?" She laughs once, mirthless and brittle, "What care have you for whose hands are on me, you have no desire to take his place."

[bouchonne]

"He is the enemy." By's chin lifts, even as his gaze remains lowered. "You've the power, now, to choose what you want to be, and you settled on making yourself the tool of a wicked man. Once again."

[coquettish_trees]

"He bled at Ghislain as you did," Alexandrie hisses, "and his House has broken ranks with the Magisterium to wage war against the forces of Corypheus across the country. He burns candles late into the night in researching artifacts the Inquisition might make use of, and you speak as if he is Venatori by virtue of his birth! He is kind to me. He cares for me." She barrels onward, "And what care have you for what I make of myself? What for my well-being? What stake have you in it, even if I were to be doing as you say?"

[bouchonne]

"What do you want me to say to that, Lexie?" His voice is sharp and brittle. "That I'm still in love with you? Would those words give you satisfaction - knowing you have an alternative if this Vint doesn't work out? Do you want me to be your little back-up plan?"

A sharp shake of his head. Control yourself, Byerly.

"I have no stake. All I wish to do is contextualize why perhaps trust is not the best decision when you are involved. It shows a marked lack of judgment, for you to go trotting back to that man who's used you like he did."

[coquettish_trees]

Yes.

"Used me?" Incredulous.

Yes, that is what I want you to say.

"What is it you think you know of us?"

[bouchonne]

"I know you were alone and miserable at Gwenaelle's wedding."

He sits back, lips pressed together.

"I know that he abandoned you. And I know you didn't know why. I can recognize the signs of abandonment without a word." Having done so himself many times. Lexie isn't the only one who's abandoned lovers for the sake of a greater game. "And then the next murmurs I hear are of an engagement. That is not the pattern of a relationship between equals."

[coquettish_trees]

With a quiet intensity, "I knew precisely why."

It is, suddenly, like being in the eye of a storm. The abrupt drop of wind when the sky is still dark and roiling, and in the distance you can see the rest of it coming. Here, then, is a chance to both finally release the frantic angry bird trapped in her chest and to do so in a way that might do the work of keeping Byerly from any further prying that could quickly turn to ruin for both Loki and his House, and she sounds the laugh of a woman on the block just before the fall of the headsman's axe.

"He is a clever man, and knows enough of me to see what soft dreams I still cling to when I am with you. He confronted me with as much, I could not deny it, and such things are so rare to he and I that—" The truth hides the truth better than any lie, and Alexandrie doesn't have to create the way her body closes to protect her. "I could have spread my legs for all of Kirkwall and it would have meant less than nothing, but to hold me with the raw and precious intimacy we had found and wonder whose arms I thought of? He could not bear it."

"My abandonment? Was of my own making." She looks down, counts the lines in the grain of the wood below, her voice a near whisper. "But when finally you witnessed the spirits play out what anguish I had so carefully hidden, and my arms had enough courage in them to wind again around you and I could find no such echo in you I—" Her arms tighten, and then relax, dropping to her sides in a tired defeat that seeps into her voice.

"What care have you for this. We are strangers now. Old houses in which only ghosts remain. We do not know each other, we do not trust each other, and I have waited like a fool in hope a dead branch should bloom. You are right. My heart is no cleverer now than it was the day I went with unfettered joy to become another portrait on the wall of Ezoire." She turns her head to look at the door. "I should not have come."

[bouchonne]

"If I were what you accused me of being."

It hurts to hear, of course. He'd slaughtered his sister's love for him, destroyed it methodically and ruthlessly. It seems he's done the same again. Destroyed it all. He feels abruptly unbearably alone.

"If I were a spy - what room would there be for someone like you? For anyone?"

A jerky shake of his head.

"Besides, you know my family's reputation. I'll be mad before I'm fifty. The house isn't full of ghosts, Alexandrie. It's burned to the fucking ground. All you look at is ashes."

[coquettish_trees]

"Think you me any different soil?" Alexandrie does not look back. "Yet there are things that grow still in..." she trails off, placing a hand over her mouth and shaking her head before turning it to set her finger between her lips, dropping it again. What is she doing.

Go home, Alexandrie.

[bouchonne]

"Yes." The answer is flat. "Yes, Lexie. You are different soil."

[coquettish_trees]

"Then tell me I was right. Look at me and tell me I was right." She does look at him now; it is half plea, half challenge. "Tell me you no longer love me. That you cannot, and will not, and—" the breath sticks in her throat. "And I will trouble you no further."