faderift | 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!

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! ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

And Alexandrie folds like a house of cards, presses her face awkwardly somewhere near his shoulder and rocks with him, keening her grief for the girl who plucked roses for her hair on the way to her fate, and for the heartbreak laid at her own feet that she'd carried like an unopened locket for eight years.

Whenever she calms, Colin pries away from her to wipe his cheeks with his sleeves. He gets up, he puts water on to boil, and he finds a cloth for her to wipe her face with, handing it to her without a word.

The bread, still baking, is beginning to smell of carbon while Alexandrie spends a long moment of simply holding the cloth Colin had given her over her face. Her head hurts from both wine and weeping and she is loathe to remove it and see the world again.

Colin takes the bread out. Overbaked is an understatement, although there is minimal smoke. He spreads the coals so they will die out. The water boils; he makes tea with lavender, chamomile, and elfroot, and pours it into two big cups. He brings one to her and sits beside her with his own, taking a few deep breaths of the steam before speaking.

"He told me he's a horrible, wicked man. Now I see why."

She shakes her head into the cloth, and then finally sets it aside in favor of wrapping her hands around the tea and staring into the floating sachet of herbs instead as their colors darken the water and the steam sets to soothing the puffiness of her eyes.

"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."

"You think he's decided it was his fault that you hurt him?"

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.

"Perhaps he blames the both of us in turn, as I often do," Alexandrie replies with a wan smile. "If he had not served Rolant and his hangers-on, Emile and I might not have chosen him as the first rung in my ladder out of the pit of my disgrace. If I had not been so frightened to be so weak and stupid as to allow myself again to place myself in the hands of another, I might not have ruined him so."

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."

"There's no way to let him go but to let him go," Colin offers. He takes a long sip of tea. "Though don't take that from me, because I've never been in love. But whatever you decide to do, I'll be here for you, all right?"

"I have never let anything go, Colin," she says with a sad bemused smile, suddenly knowing it for truth. "Least of all anything I love."

"I think you can do it. I mean I'm sure you'll always love him, but I think you can do anything."

"You have ever made me think so." She takes a long slow sip of tea, and shifts herself awkwardly closer so she can lay her head on Colin's shoulder. "I am hardly so sure of myself. But I never wish to disappoint you."

"Don't be silly," he says lightly, giving her a kiss on the top of her head. "Why do you think you would ever disappoint me?"

"You saw Espére bate, when that hare leapt from the bushes." The Merlin had risen, flapping wildly, nearly tearing the jesses from Alexandrie's hand, and then unable to reclaim her perch properly on the gauntlet had reached and scrabbled with her talons, catching their sharpness in her mistress's arm above the leather before she ended hanging upside down, chirping her distress.

Colin had healed it quickly enough, for all its depth, and Espére had been righted and hooded and pet and calmed, but the example remains.

"I am so frightened, always, with those I care for. I fear I might tear you to shreds in the extremity of it," as she had done to Kitty, to Byerly. She had even taken a swipe at Loki, when he had pushed her away. The corner of her mouth twitches slightly upwards in a smile. At the least Gwenaëlle was a falconer too excellent—or too covered in leather—to be taken so.

"I'm not actually very fragile," Colin notes. "Drink your tea. But now I know, when you're afraid and a bit, um, scratchy, that it's not me you're scratching. It's the monster who hurt you. Byerly says he's dead, isn't he?"

She nods against his shoulder, trying to drink her tea sideways so she doesn't have to raise her head in the kittenish way she has when both inebriated and pacified.

"In the Civil War."

open | neither snow nor rain

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