EVENT: TRUTH BOMB

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: TRUTH BOMB
WHEN: Bloomingtide 15-17
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: OOC information. Use appropriate content warnings in your subject lines, please.

It’s an ordinary day—so not a very pleasant one. The weather is dreary and muggy, and the day’s lunch is a soup that’s a little too watery and bland. The griffons are being their usual level of noisy and swoopy. The work is its usual level of urgent and difficult.

But in the storage rooms, something wiggles. Then it hums. Then it pops.

Outside of the storage room, there’s no actual sound, no shift in the wind, and no visible sign of a change. But the pop might be felt—like the moment something finally clicks, or two ideas suddenly fit together, except the opposite. In the heads of everyone in the fortress, something is suddenly not connected quite right.

The first sign of what’s gone wrong is that someone immediately stands up and tells the cook how bad the soup is.

A lot of people’s days are about to get exponentially worse.

Comments

[indissection]

Lunches have become something of a pastime for the two of them; eating together and trading barbs mixed with compliments, acting as though there is no tension between them when, in fact, there is a great deal that flickers to life when they're at a table together. Sidony might find it more irritating if she wasn't so entertained - Lexie is, at least, something of a decent sparring partner, the kind she has not had since she had fled from Nevarra.

They're settled together now, sipping their familiar teas, with Sidony's eyes flickering over the scenery around them. Unfortunately, she hasn't had a chance to buy anything new and up to date for some time and it shows; her clothes are beginning to repeat. She would be more irritated if she didn't have a rather decent excuse; with her focus on her work she has no time for shopping.

That's what she tells herself.

"I think the tea was nicer lasat time."

[coquettish_trees]

"You think so? I find it has the same degree of relative mediocrity," Alexandrie replies, sipping it regardless. "Much like everything in Kirkwall. Save the smell in Darktown; that is extraordinary."

She'd been taking a brief moment to look at the trees herself and had replied absently, her reflexive politesse made null by whatever had happened. Consequently, she looks irritated and makes a 'tsk' noise. Really damn this entire business.

[indissection]

"I do miss the kind my mother had at home. If I wasn't so cautious of her finding out where I was I might write and ask for some to be sent, but things clearly are not right for such deliveries right now."

Not with armies on the move, the threats to Tevinter, the dangers across even touching Nevarra. No, Sidony would not risk someone going to collect her tea, no matter how spoiled she might be, nor would she risk her mother trekking across the continent to drag her home by the ear.

"Have you been there lately? It's getting worse."

[coquettish_trees]

"Nevarra?" is the light inquiry, "Or Darktown."

[indissection]

"Perhaps they are one and the same and I have been a slum dweller this entire time."

Smirking behind her teacup.

[coquettish_trees]

"You have kept yourself remarkably clean and beautiful then, considering." It's been a subject of both admiration and irritation. Sidony always somehow manages to look as if she were equally ready to go to a party, slide into bed, or pick up a surgeon's knife, and she wears her beauty purposeful and sharp as the last. Despite Alexandrie's slow absenting of herself from her old habits, and despite her deep happiness in her soon-to-be husband, and despite her relative settled peace with Byerly, it goads her to an edged competitiveness which she is both aware of and dislikes in herself.

Naturally, she is often wont to take her irritation out on Sidony, who would be blameless save that her fine hair seems to shine in the sun with the casual gloss of a raven's plumage even when it is arranged simply, and Alexandrie is obliged to have Marie patiently oil and tame her more fractious curls to achieve the same, so instead she deserves it.

"I have been recently to neither, so I suppose I might have answered the same to both. Do you find yourself frequenting the latter?"

[indissection]

"One must try," Sidony smiles, her hair falling over her shoulders as she makes herself more comfortable. Yes, of course, she has always tried very hard to make sure that she is always attractive, always handsome, always beautiful. It is what her mother had wanted from her and she takes pride in that - people don't expect someone of her beauty to have her intelligence, but here she is all the same.

If Sidony could understand Lexie's feelings she might comment on it, but for now, she seems entirely bereft and unable to empathise whatsoever. Beauty has always come easily to her; it's everything else she has wished that has always been a touch more difficult to muster.

"Darktown? Not frequently, but more than others might, I'm sure. Anders and I have visited a few times."

[coquettish_trees]

A thin of her lips for mention of Anders. It's not quite anything so vulgar as a grimace, but she's certainly not pleased.

"Have you found the healer an unobjectionable companion?"

[indissection]

"I have. He is wise and has been most kind to me as I've settled into the infirmary. He has been an invaluable source of advice on many things quite close to my heart."

Thankfully, she doesn't have to say any more than that, despite what urges prickle under the surface of her skin.

"I'm fond of him indeed."

[coquettish_trees]

Disbelieving eyebrows raise, but drop again quickly enough with a brief lift of her shoulders. "I suppose he was most kind when I came to ask after and depend on his expertise." Alexandrie replies in a tone that suggests it had not remained so when she stood up. She remembers how important it had been, how necessary. Enough to send her in breeches and boots to Darktown with a sword snuck from her sister at her waist. But to her when Colin was hurt, to Loki, and afterwards, with Byerly—

"—he was most assumptive, and condescending. As if because we were not mages, because we were nobility, we could not have known what it is to be made powerless and shamed before all. Myself I might have stood, but Byerly—"

She finds she's been speaking aloud as she ruminates, and cuts off with an irritated sound and the rather too forceful replacement of her teacup in the saucer. Tea escapes it, and now she grimaces. This damnable day.

[indissection]

It does seem rather odd, and Sidony herself can admit it. She had made no secret of her frustrations with mages, of her somewhat envious tension with them, and yet here she sits, content and pleased to allow herself to be seen as a friend with one. It is difficult for her to express honestly what Anders has done to help her, what he has done in his quest to support her, but she does what she can all the same, a small smile on her face.

"He can be, yes, but perhaps that is when he is working and not allowing himself a moment for a personal conversation. He has been a great aid for me as I have begun to understand things about myself and my place in this world. I do not think I could do without him and without Byerly."

Sidony's own lips purse, but she's not entirely sure if she can stop herself talking, even as she bites at her cheek.

"They are more like brothers to me than my own brother was, showing me a path I had never dared accept."

[coquettish_trees]

Like brothers?

"It would be a fine thing, I think," is the careful reply, "For Byerly to have someone he considered so."

Testing. Not merely Sidony feeling their relationship so, is it?

[indissection]

"Well, that is indeed what he has me for." Sidony sips at her tea, acting nonchalant even if she must express the truth. "He and I have spoken often about the nature of our friendship and our desire to accept ourselves as siblings long lost from one another."

It is not as though she can rely on Octavian, after all.

"I am sure he understands."

[coquettish_trees]

And so she trades one measure of envy for another. It is, as it turns out, any professed closeness that nibbles away at her, even if the bites are from a different creature.

But there is as little point in dwelling on this as there was before, when she thought them lovers. At least he has some measure of genuine comfort from someone. And if she is such to him, perhaps Alexandrie can be... kinder.

“I am... glad.” She finds she can’t stop there, since she isn’t. Entirely. “That you have found a support here.”

There.

[indissection]

Sidony, it seems, is unconcerned. Whatever feelings burn in Lexie's heart does not bother her any longer; she is frightfully tied of feeling put out by a friendship that she clings to with both hands, clutching at him and digging her nails in deep.

She needs Byerly. She needs him to keep her safe, keep her sane, to be there when she has a word to say - or for her to be his ear in return. She is as devoted to him as she imagines he is to her, in his own way.

"Thank you," she says finally, prim and proper, sipping from her tea and trying not to look smug. "I think we are both lucky to have found one another here."