Nahariel Dahlasanor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nadasharillen) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
faderift2019-02-04 09:09 pm
nadasharillen) wrote in faderift2019-02-04 09:09 pm
open | neither snow nor rain
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!
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! ]
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"No," he admits quietly.
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She turns her wrist, rotating the glass back and forth smoothly. "And even if you had wished to, I believed there to be no world in which you could get the better of me. This made you safe.
"But I have become weak and soft in my time away from the flock of wicked hearts that wing behind Her Radiance wherever she walks. And if you become one accustomed to looking, and listening, and putting away," and bringing those things to him. "I—" Alexandrie trails off, lifting her shoulders in a gentle shrug and tipping the rest of the wine back with such care and concentration that it signifies she has perhaps been drinking for as long as she's been baking.
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"When I'm not actually spying on a mission," he says softly, "it's the last thing I'm going to want to do when I get home. I'm going to come to you for refuge from all of that. This isn't a lifestyle for me, and you're never going to be a target. If, for some reason, they asked me to? I'd tell them to shove it. You're more important to me than anyone, carina."
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"I believe it of you, yet it hardly matters what you mean to do. Once you are accustomed to looking for such things, you shall gather them as a matter of course from everyone around you. A simple reflex. It is as one might breathe; you may do so with intent and thought, but your chest yet rises and falls when you think of other things.
"One needs not use weapons to forge them, cher," she says quietly, "and the creature I made of myself cannot but guard itself at the sound of iron being struck."
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He releases her from the hug and sighs, running his fingers through his hair, unable to conceal some irritation.
"Exactly what do you want from me, Lexie?"
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"And I do not want you to learn to become a man who has those same fears." Alexandrie runs a unsteady hand down her face, holds her elbow with one hand, tilts her glass to drink with the other. "They poison everything.
"I want you to stay kinder than I. It is selfish of me, perhaps, but I thought perhaps if I..." Here finally, a single tear escapes down her cheek. "In some small way I might save a bit of her." For they are not the same, the girl at sixteen with the loose curls and the brightly beating winged hopeful heart and the hard fearful thing she had become.
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"And how many times do I have to say this isn't that kind of job, and that I'm not you?"
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"Is it because of Byerly's cousin?"
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"Does he tell you also what I sound like at the height of passion? That my hands shook like leaves the night before I abandoned him?"
Alexandrie snaps back the rest of the wine and slams the empty glass down on the table behind her hard enough for the stem to crack. It stands, still.
"Everything is because of Rolant de Ezoire."
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"Did he rape you?" he asks, voice barely above a whisper.
cw: date rape, brief mention of bestiality
"He? Oh, no. I came to him willingly. Eagerly. What young woman would not speed her steps toward the handsome, charismatic heir of the de Ezoire dukedom. To the young man who after one chance meeting at court plied her with letters for a full year brimming with ardent all-consuming love and promises of marriage, of laying the world at her feet.
"No, when his close friend Fermin brought me a note from him two weeks before we were to be formally introduced at court and offered gallantly to escort me to meet my golden intended, I took his arm with wings on my heels. I gave myself up with the blushing untutored rawness of an overawed besotted girl. He poured me a glass of wine." Alexandrie casts her glance about for another bottle, reaches for it to wrench the cork from the neck with a fierce violence. "And I remember nothing after until I woke alone in the silk of his sheets with a splitting head, unable to tell the time, barely able to recall how I had come to this place, and he," she casts the cork aside vengefully and gestures with the bottle, "and Fermin, and Claude, were watching a man sketching on a canvas and laughing. I vaguely recall them pleading with him for a turn at me. He laughed again, looked into my eyes, and told them not to ruin the positioning, for he had paid the painter quite a sum.
"I remember nothing of what may have occurred, but it turned out beautifully when he had it shown at his salon the day before Geneviève and I were meant to make our debut, so I imagine whatever they did was done carefully. I made a charming Fereldan stablegirl, and a fine bitch for the mabari."
tw: sexual abuse
Tears quaver in Colin's eyes, and fall despite the fact that he hasn't blinked. He can't breathe, and there's a rushing sound in his ears. That was more detail than he could bear, and now he can only see Ser Wallace giving Ser Lutair an irritated look after walking in on them in an empty room in the mages' quarters. The brief, timid hope that it was finally over, that someone was here who could put an end to it, and then... You can play with your toys later. We have to go now.
And her humiliation wasn't just a joke among a select group of people. It was advertised, displayed in an art exhibition, a horror she couldn't escape from the moment she woke feeling stiff and sore. And she couldn't learn what happened to her own body until the same moment everyone else did. He knows the sensations she would have felt, and for the moment, he can feel them again. Bruises, burns, tears, abrasions. Worse than that, stickiness, sliminess, salt of sweat, and the sour taste that never washes out.
He can't do this. He thought he could do this, and he can't.
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"Did he tell you too, why I chose him?" It's dogged and ragged and spoken to the air. It's simply because she hasn't said it, because she's never said it, because it's leaking from her like wine from a broken cup. "Because he was a simple easy target. Because even though they were cruel to him as well, he did their favors. He fetched their whores. He ran their errands. He drank their wine. And I loved him anyway." Here, the bottle clutched to her chest, Alexandrie curls over it to repeat herself as if her words were the evidence that would condemn the world to the punishment it deserved.
"I loved him," curls further, "I loved him," her breath rasps, "I loved him, and I—" she chokes, and sinks slowly to the ground with her arms wrapped tightly around the glass, heedless of the gentle slosh of the wine from its neck as she sobs brokenly with her head buried against her knees.
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"He told me he's a horrible, wicked man. Now I see why."
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"He is no more wicked than any other who needs to survive, and ungenerous enough to himself that it is hardly necessary to agree with him." Alexandrie sips the tea, and leaves her lips against the rim of the cup for a time before raising her head again. "He was kind to me when no-one else was. We had our season in the sun, and it was a season such that one night I found I had given up my heart again, and in terror of it I ripped him apart in full view of all as if I had been simply toying with him from the start. As if everyone else had known, save him. I drove him from what support he had found. From the country entire."
Quietly, into her tea. "Byerly deserves his anger."
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It's a shot in the dark. He's still not quite sure why he's being stubborn about believing the best of Byerly. Maybe because they have to work together. Maybe because his wink made him blush. He remembers throwing a crumpled napkin at him and feeling lighter than he has in years. He wants to keep that around.
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She sighs, thin and gusty as winter wind.
"But he did. And I did. And now we are strangers to each other, and know each other only by the scars that are left, and I..." Another sigh, through her lips and accompanied by the reappearance of the liquid shine over her eyes, "Must... find... some way to let him go."
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