faderift | open | neither snow nor rain

Entry tags:

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! ]

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"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?"

"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."

Yes.

"Used me?" Incredulous.

Yes, that is what I want you to say.

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

"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."

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."

"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."

"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.

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

"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."

He's quiet. He doesn't look at her. He doesn't say what she wants him to, either. Instead, lowly, he asks, "Would that make you happy?"

It issues from her as hardly more than the breath she took to say it.

“No.”

"Then why do you ask for it?"

Edited 2019-02-23 11:48 (UTC)

“Why do you wish me happy?”

"Why is it, Lexie," he says, his voice soft, "that you presume that lust is required for there to be love?"

The question furrows her brow in obvious confusion, wiping the trail of her thoughts clear like a wave claiming sand. After the blankness a hundred words bloom, from a wry think you I wrap my body around Gwenaëlle? to does desire make the heart lesser? to what makes you think you know anything of me now? to a simple why?; they all flit across her face before finally she is still and looks down at the floor again.

"Do you remember the story," she is soft as well, "of Geneviève and I losing ourselves in the woods behind the château?"

A number of quips come to mind in response to that. He refrains from uttering them; instead he offers a simple, "Of course."

"Love is that woods, to me. Something I once knew the shape of that in the dark and the rain turned strange."

Alexandrie looks up, her face bare and plain and open. "I presume nothing. I am only on unfamiliar ground with my small fire, with my sister gone to search for something to keep it alight, not knowing if I shall see home, or anyone, again, with the path I tread to get here washed away. I know only that you are missing from me, and it was I who went away, and that I do not deserve to return. But also that there are sheafs of music packed away at Val Fontaine that I cannot play alone, and that I miss the shelter of your arms on the roofs of Val Royeaux, and to hear your stories through your shoulder. That I want you to smile when you think of me, to be able to smile when I think of you."

And she does smile, now, small and beside the shining track of tears.

"And that whatever you say to me of it now, I will leave here believing."

He doesn't smile back. No. Instead, he simply looks down at his drink, the last traces of it in his glass, watching the way the light dapples through it. Throws it back, then, and stands to pour another. As the liquor cascades into the glass, he speaks, softly, saying -

"I had a love before you. Long before you. She is - always has been - cold and distant. Sometimes I wonder if she loves me back. But I fear I will never love any so much as I love her.

"In the days after we parted, you and I, she came to me. And she offered me something more, a consummation of my lifelong passion. It is not good, what we have; it is not kind. It is likely to be the death of me. But I am not strong enough to turn down this feverish desire, dear Alexandrie. So you see - it is not a rejection of you; it is this other love affair, one which demands my loyalty."

He turns, then, and meets her eyes.

"Will that help?" That story? Immensely true?

"No," she replies, still with the same little smile, another drop joining the others. He will not leave his work, she will not leave Loki. They have little to offer each other, now, standing on opposite sides of a ravine that is worn too deep to cross. But it settles into her, like the feeling of finally folding away a dress she had worn as a younger woman, knowing as she carefully straightens its folds and runs her fingers over the faded embroidery a last time that she will never wear it again.

She looks at him carefully, as if committing something to memory, and closes the lid.

Then, with a quiet fondness like the run of a hand through hair, or the soft press of lips to a forehead, "Adieu, Byerly."

Byerly doesn't make a sound. For a moment, he hardly even moves. Then, with a face utterly devoid of emotion, eyes that give absolutely nothing away, he lifts his chin in acknowledgment.

Nothing more than that.

And Alexandrie turns, with the slow grace of the swan of her crest, and leaves.

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