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

[nadasharillen]

"I was down at the docks the other day, taking measurements for ship repair," she says, very nearly managing to be conversational although the persistent tap of her finger against her mug and symmetricality of her smile rather than its usual casual lopsided nature gives away the trepidation still lurking in her, "and there were some Marcher women nearby mending nets and singing, and... uh..."

It'd been a simple tune she'd quickly caught as she worked, and they'd grinned to hear her whistling along. She'd gone over once she'd finished and asked after it. They'd explained, and had quickly gotten over their wariness of her to laugh and gently tease her when she blushed and asked to learn the words. Women in love are women in love, whether or not they'd grown up in Starkhaven or emerged from the deep forests with pointed ears and tattooed faces. She's blushing slightly now as she clears her throat. It's an unsteady and rough start, but Nari has the trained ear of a storyteller from an oral tradition and her pronunciation is good even if the melody falters a bit at first in the low huskiness of her rarely used singing voice.

"'S tu uasal a's maiseach
Gruaidhean meachair mar mhaighdean
Sùil an t-saighdear fo d' mhalaidh,"

She wonders, a bit, if he knows it.

"Gaol peathar gaol bràthair
Gaol màthair a's athar,"

For a clan, for a people.

"An gaol a thug mi cha trèig mi
gus an tèid mi 's an anart."

Now her smile quirks to the side, her fingers rolling once against the cup in her hands and then stilling. "Happy anniversary."

[onlyhymns]

He does know it, or a part of him does: a part of him that hasn't heard it since he was small, sung perhaps by a scullery maid or a stable worker as he wandered about his father's house. Cade is struck by it, at first looking almost shocked, then settling into the melody as Nari continues through it, his eyes misty with the struggle of seeking intangible long-lost memory, a slight pinkness in his cheeks indicating his emotional response.

When she's finished, he's silent for a moment, then ducks his head with a little nod, as though to wordlessly say it back. "...thank you," he murmurs.

[nadasharillen]

That's all she had, really. The closest Nari's come to saying 'love' at all, having found it easier and more meaningful by far to express the warm quiet fullness of her heart in the myriad of things from the masterwork of his bow to the small way she shifts now to rest her shoulder against Cade's with the ease borne of time and the careful cultivation that she could never manage to achieve with anything green.

She does turn her head though, her lean a little more weighty for a moment as she reaches to place a featherlight kiss on his cheek before she settles back down.

[onlyhymns]

It's better, really. Spoken words can't always be trusted, can always contain hidden meanings or little pockets of poison, even when said by the kindest of voices; Cade never got the hang of them, has never been able to find any confidence in verbalization.
So it's the nonverbal things, the gestures, that really speak to him. A song sung, a kiss placed that seems to catalyze a bloom of pink where it landed, which spreads over his face with a grateful smile.

He opens his mouth, as if to say something, but just closes it again, too shy. He glances at her mouth, blushes harder, looks away.

[nadasharillen]

Sitting as she is, Nari only catches the movement because she's got her face slightly inclined towards him so she can watch both the fire and the way the light shifts on him. Her smile crooks upward slightly and she tilts her head in silent inquiry.

[onlyhymns]

His head twitches slightly, and Cade leans down, then away, then clears his throat.
"Um," he murmurs into his curled hand, "could I-... would it... would it be all right, um..."

[nadasharillen]

One of Nari's eyebrows raises just slightly for a moment and she blinks, made curious by the halting speech that seems as if it's on its way to become a request. It's not as if Cade didn't speak this way regularly, but it's always interesting to find out what it is that gives him such pause. She's never tried to finish his sentences for him, preferring instead to watch and wait patiently for him to get wherever it is he's trying to go. This time is no different.

[onlyhymns]

Perhaps speaking the request isn't going to get him anywhere. Cade halts in his attempt, and, looking nervously toward Nari, brings his face a little closer to hers, and tucks one hand under her chin the way people do it in romantic stories.
It occurs to him then that he has no idea what he's really doing-- he's never kissed anyone before-- but he's gone too far to look back now.

[nadasharillen]

She has. Once. And it was less “kissing” and more “being kissed”. Nari had thought then, in the shadows outside the Arlathvhen’s campfires where all the young men and women of the Clans escaped off to eventually, excited by the prospect of elves strange to them, her mind absent and separate from the odd pressure of lips against hers, that it was supposed to mean something. It hadn't. But now…

Now just his slight movement toward her and the warmth of his hesitant fingers makes her tremble with a mix of anticipation and fear and several other things she doesn't know the names for, all of it naked and evident in her eyes, but even so she reaches up her hand to mirror Cade’s and moves to meet him.