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

Swan Song -- Colin again, but later on

[coquettish_trees]

Following her outburst, their sinking to the floor to weep jaggedly together, even after the time she'd spent calm and leaning against Colin's shoulder, Alexandrie is brittle and erratic and moves about like a stormcloud at high wind. She goes out.

The next morning, it's calm. And the next morning. And the next. She comes and goes at her regular hours. She says hello, and goodbye, and smiles, and laughs, and kisses Colin's forehead. She will go to market if he asks. She marshals the extra servants she's hired to move the remainder of her personal belongings across Hightown to the Asgard estate. She meets with a friend of her father's to discuss the planned renovations. She does her work and welcomes his interruptions warmly, although she gently directs the conversation to lighter things.

One early evening, he will discern the faint smell of burning paper. And following it, music. Melody. Quiet low repeated chords. Carefully counted measures of silence entire. Melody again.

[keenly]

He is scraping the last of their dinner into a bowl--how strange it is, to have any excess--and he smells something burning. Worried, he sets the bowl aside and follows the smell of smoke, and hears the music.

What is that song? It's serene and poignant, and he doesn't think he's heard her play it before. He opens the door to the room and peers at Alexandrie, then scans the room for signs of a fire.

[coquettish_trees]

There is one, although not in the room. It is past the wide glass doors on the other side of the room on the covered balcony, small but bright in the gathering dark.

Here, closer, Colin will be able to hear her humming a second line as she plays.

[keenly]

The piece is hauntingly beautiful. She seems preoccupied enough that he can creep out to the balcony, and so he tries to do. Whatever it is burning out there, it ought to be stamped out.

[coquettish_trees]

Playing from memory as she is, and lost in the same, her eyes are closed. If she notices his cross of the room, or the quiet click of the door opening and closing, or the chill that slips into the room as Colin slips out, she doesn't give sign.

What is still burning, with a stone from the garden placed over the middle of them to prevent the sea wind from snatching them away before they've finished, are the remains of two thick sheets of high quality paper. The flame is taking its time, given the robustness of their make, but the edges have curled and sent their ashes off the balcony. It's difficult to make out with both fire and stone but they appear to be charcoal drawings, the subject of the first of which is playing violin. Although their face is covered by the stone, the hands (and recent context) are perhaps distinct enough to make an educated guess as to the identity thereof.

[keenly]

It doesn't take much. She's letting go.

The wind mysteriously picks up, but only on the balcony, fanning the flame into an inferno. The paper is consumed quickly, and he stamps out the remaining embers before returning to the room. Quietly, he sits beside her on the bench, wraps an arm around her waist, and kisses the top of her head.

[coquettish_trees]

Despite the slight hamper of Colin's presence beside her, Alexandrie continues to play, accompanying herself, until the movement is over, only lifting her hands from the keys a few moments after the last note has faded. They settle into her lap, afterwards, and then she leans sideways to gently lay her head against his shoulder. It's entirely quiet, but it's not long before a slightly warm wetness begins to make his shirt cling beneath where her face rests.

[keenly]

Both arms wrap around her now, rotating her so she can lay her head against his shoulder.

"I'm really proud of you," he says quietly, one hand stroking her hair.

[coquettish_trees]

But she only shakes her head.

"You should not be," is her quiet reply from where she is now tucked beneath his chin. "I think I have done it again."

[keenly]

"Done what?" he asks gently.

[coquettish_trees]

"Left him alone," she says. It is even, despite the slow flow of tears.

"I felt so strongly, this time, that it was he who was leaving me. But I think it was I, caught up as I was in what I wanted and could not have."

[keenly]

"Maybe you ought to leave him alone?" Colin sounds faintly confused. "I think doing otherwise is hurting you both. You're so happy with Loki, and when Byerly's around, it, I don't know. Makes you sad to see the one that got away, and muddles everything."

[coquettish_trees]

"It is only that..." now, finally, a quiet sniffle, "that I feel as if I have done nothing in this life but hurt and abandon him with only care for my own fears, my own desires, and that I shall never ever do right by him." Alexandrie shakes her head, the tears finally creeping into her voice. "And there are so few, who have done right by him."

[keenly]

"That's...understandable." He gives her a squeeze. "But it might be that any right-doing where he is concerned could only come from someone else. Letting him go might be the kindest thing you could do for him, and for yourself."

[coquettish_trees]

Her face crumples at that, and she turns into Colin's shoulder entirely with a ragged gasp to begin sobbing in earnest.

[keenly]

He holds her tight, rubs her back gently, and waits for the storm to pass.

"Tell me something," he says when she is quiet. "Would you be happier with him than with Loki?"

He knows the answer. He just wants her to hear herself say it.

[coquettish_trees]

She shakes her head against him, slowly. No. Not now. Their season for that was done. Byerly had found a home for his honor in a way that would not be released, and she did not regret her choice to bind her future to the man who had found her in the dark as much as she had found him. So, no. No.

"But I thought perhaps I might be a f—friend to him, as I am to you. Th—that I might someday be s-s-safe, in a world that is not. I could, I think, be content with that.

"But perhaps you are right. Perhaps a rosebush cannot shed its thorns for want of being a willow, and the safest I can be is g-g... is gone." The effort of saying so is enough to set her to weeping again.

[keenly]

"No, carina." He squeezes her again. "Not in the least. It's not you, or him, that's failing. It's just that the past happened, and it still has power. That's the thing that has thorns round you both."

[coquettish_trees]

She thinks of Frigga; how the nightmares of the sudden violence of her death had faded once she had replaced it with the work of her portrait. Of Loki, and how every morning she awoke with him still sleeping next to her tended the land left barren by Rolant's betrayal. Of Kitty and Gwenaëlle, standing defiantly against the furnace of her anger to stay with her when she'd seared away so many others and in doing so had damped its flame. Of Colin himself, and the way they had slowly and with love and care written over his intimate fears.

"A broken glass cannot be a glass again, I know," she says, "but if we let go of wishing to bring back the glass, it can become something new, can it not? A chime to catch the wind. A pot for a plant, perhaps, in which drainage is desired. A... a..." Thinking about these things, the proof of change, that different did not have to mean gone, has apparently restored a small twitch of humor, even though she has not sat up, and her voice is thick and muffled in his shoulder. "A worrying chandelier."

It is how Helena had said. That it is right to cut some things, so that what can still live will better grow.

"Because the branch has died, it does not mean the tree has. It will not grow the same branch again, but if there is still life in it, it will grow another."

[keenly]

"In time." Another squeeze. "But you can't force these things. You just have to be patient and let time do what it needs to do."

[coquettish_trees]

"I do not think you understand the way in which I... he said something, but I heard only what I feared to. I thought he had thrown away the glass entire, and so I did the same, but I am no longer sure, and he will still think I have done so. That I have felled the tree." Now Alexandrie draws back. She looks a mess, and suffused with worry besides. "And if I say nothing of it I fear I will have."

[keenly]

There's a decently long pause, with a knowing gleam in Colin's eye.

"Well. You don't want him in the flat. You go after him for trying to corrupt me. And then you sever all ties with him, and I come home to find you've burned some drawings of him. And you've spent the last ten minutes crying as if someone died. So, he and I both have the impression that yes, it's all over. If it's not, why all the rest of it?"

[coquettish_trees]

A genuine shock and surprise flashes across her face for a brief moment before her eyes narrow to slits and she pulls back, her voice clipped.

"I did not want him here because I left my fear behind for a moment to go reach for him and he returned nothing. I went after him for fear I should lose you the way I lost myself. I bid him farewell after saying to him what I have most feared to say and believing I heard what I most feared to hear, and only now have I been able to consider that it might not have been so.

"I cannot be scared? I cannot make mistakes? I cannot guard myself from phantoms I myself have crafted? Have I ever spoken to you so?"

She stands, steps unsteadily backwards, her tone lowering. "Or is this because you already speak for 'he and I', now."

[keenly]

"Lexie?" He remains seated, still open to her. "I'm only letting you know how it's looked, up to now. Everyone's entitled to mistakes. But if it is a mistake, and not your intent, you have time to correct it."

Really. Nobles are absolute wrecks. Byerly is constantly insisting he's the worst, so of course she thinks he wants nothing to do with her. It's like it would kill these people to say what they actually feel.

[coquettish_trees]

She looks wild, like this. As a beast might be, when cornered. Always, she is like this, as if where she strips away the perfect porcelain of the exterior she'd forged for herself so long ago in Orlais she strips away her skin as well, leaving only a rawness that screams at the slightest abrasion.

For Colin, she had removed it all, and this unexpected relative roughness from him hard on the heels of reaching into the new and aching hollow of her sorrow to pull it out for him to see is too much. Especially with the way he'd looked at her just then before delivering his sanction, as if he'd thought he'd known everything already without asking--had heard it, perhaps, from Byerly and taken it as read--and had thought to catch her with it. And the thing in her with talons wants to sink them into him in equal measure. More, harder, so he will not think to do it again.

But she had just been thinking of Kitty. Of what Gwenaelle had said after she'd ripped her to shreds. And Colin has pulled back from it, now, rather than push the advantage he may have sought, or continued to hold the ground as challenge, and so he will be able to watch her fight herself down, piece by piece. The slow of her breath, the release of her muscles like a slow smooth wave from the top of her head to her feet: the minute places in her face, her neck, her shoulders, the lengthening of her back, the release of her fists at her sides. And Alexandrie covers her face with her freed hands and simply stands.