open | grief is the thing with feathers

[coquettish_trees]

WHO: Lexie, Thor, Colin, you?
WHAT: a collection of dramas
WHEN: after The News drops
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: (I'm not doing a general, but anyone who wants to come at her or have me write something, come touch me gently with a paw @ shaestorms or shae#7274 on discord) okay maybe I am doing general prompts, but you can still put a paw on me.

Day One: The Chantry Gardens

Alexandrie doesn't paint the living. It had made even the process of selecting canvas funereal. There are five leaning against her chair with an air of solemnity to them, bright and white in the sunlight, and one on her easel covered with a clamped down sketch, the lines of which she is tracing over with a stylus. A genial looking fellow with lively, interested eyes and an easy smile accentuated by the mustache above it, the slightly curling dark of his hair mussed in the way that always makes one appear as if they could not be anything but the most genuine of souls.

She straightens to regard it, her skirts ruffling in the breeze.


Day Two: Library

There is a quiet noise, somewhere amidst the shelves. A person noise, rather than the shuffling of books.

After a while, long enough to dismiss it, it repeats; a soft kind of gasping.

If one were to be curious enough, a search for the source would reveal Alexandrie sitting with her skirts pooled around her with her hand over her mouth to stifle the labored sob of her breath, the fingers of her other hand resting in the empty space where a book ought to be.


Day Three: Lowtown Market

Someone calls out that they have flowers, flowers that had come to full bloom this very morning, and Alexandrie's face twists with sudden incandescent rage at the immensity of the insult that things had continued to grow. That merchants had continued to sell. That down the row, someone is trying to decide which ribbon to quickly buy for their sweetheart before she notices that he's not moved on to the next stall with her.

The call again—Beautiful spring blossoms! Brighten your home! Charm your wife!—and Alexandrie rounds on the man with a snarl so quickly it sends apples bouncing from the basket she carries. He looks surprised.

Someone really ought to stop her.


[ or bring your own! :D ]

Comments

Thor

[coquettish_trees]

Half a breath after Loki's name issues from the crystal, there is the sharp crash of something heavy shattering from the direction of the foyer.

[thorndergod]

For the briefest of moments, Thor has hope. The crashing could be Loki. Somehow. It's all an elaborate trick, for not the first time, and Loki's home and breaking stuff in frustration because, because, Thor doesn't know the end of that. He rushes in to find it is not Loki and stops to stare at Alexandrie instead.

"He..." Words aren't working, just as much as thoughts aren't. "He has timing. A flair for it. But Kirkwall's roads are crowded at time. Give him a minute, or ten, perhaps he meant to get here right at the announcement and was delayed."

It's denial. He knows it is. Loki is vain and proud and would not give up any belongings, but they have something.

[coquettish_trees]

Although no other part of her moves, Alexandrie's pale face turns towards Thor's footfall as sharply as a startled creature's to cast her glazed and dilated eyes on him instead of continuing to stare at her still-raised hands as if she couldn't comprehend their nerveless betrayal.

It had been a cut-crystal vase. A fine one, the twin of the one already placed, proudly holding its wealth of lovingly arranged cuttings from the garden's first blooms. This one lies in wet shards at her feet, razor-edged islands among its scattered roses and the still spreading water that splashed her gown with its impact, now beginning to soak into the hem of the skirt where it rests on the floor.

Her lips part slightly and she takes a breath, says thinly: "Of course."

[thorndergod]

"Five more minutes." His voice cracks as he speaks. It's the sort of plea he'd make to his now-gone mother, five more minutes to play, five more minutes to sleep, and it's always been useless. He can't have lost someone else.

For that reason he turns to look at the doorway, waiting. Hoping. There have been times when he hasn't had enough faith in Loki before. Seconds pass, though, and there is no dramatic door-opening. There's no mocking laugh for them being so foolish as to call him dead. Slowly, slow enough that it might not be noticeable at first, Thor sags. Shortly thereafter he's leaning against the wall and sinking down it, gaze still on the door.

"He cannot be gone." What is life without his brother?

[coquettish_trees]

There is the high repetitive sound of glass being slowly pushed across marble, the muffled drag of petals, and then the light pressure of a steady hand on Thor's shoulder.

"It was behind the lines," Alexandrie says. Her voice is pitched higher than usual, comes with less force, but her tone is as conversational as it might be were she telling Thor about a nice cloud she'd seen. "Perhaps he has been forced to find a den to coil in to escape, and it has spoiled his timing." The hand squeezes once before releasing, as precise a gesture of encouragement as might be wanted, though it lacks any trace of genuine warmth.

[thorndergod]

"Don't." Her voice is cold. Exact. He can't take that right now.

"You are the only other person in this world who knows him and loves him for that knowing. There is someone who has come in from another world, even, to call him a mass-murderer. There are people in multiple countries who hate him. But we..." Thor's voice cracks, breaks, and he has to stop for a moment just to shake his head and fight to breathe.

"I do not think you truly want to be alone as you sound like you do. And I do not want to be that alone."

[coquettish_trees]

She'd turned, after letting go, to kneel down and begin to calmly retrieve the strewn greenery rose by rose from where they'd attended her skirts. She freezes there when Thor's voice cracks, a statue reaching for another flower to add to those already in her hand.

After a moment she retrieves it, and stands again to turn and look at him.

"But we are the neither of us alone," Alexandrie says; doll-like, absent, pale. "It may take time for the care of it but he will come home." There is another blossom in her hand now, though. Red and blooming swiftly through the thin fine cloth of her glove, she bleeds, her fist so tight around the stems that their thorns have found hard purchase in her, although she doesn't give any indication of feeling it at all.

[thorndergod]

He stares at her woodenly, watching her go through the motions of cleaning up. It's meaningless. More things will break, as everything breaks. As his family has broken. As his country is breaking.

A slowly-spreading red stain threatens to pull him from the thoughts he wants to sink into so badly. How he'd failed his mother, and how he should have been with Loki. How he doesn't even know if his father is all right. Somehow it wins.

"You're bleeding." Somehow he finds his feet again and the strength to take her injured hand in his, pulling away and dropping the flowers right back on the ground. "I am not much of a healer, but I think this is not beyond me. Unless you would prefer it to be wrapped."

[coquettish_trees]

It's honestly surprising to her to see the bloodied palm and fingers of her glove. It merits a blink, an "oh," and then a practiced movement to remove it much as she might upon discovering any other stain.

But then she is holding a bloodied glove, and the last time she'd done that it was to toss it to Loki in a graceful arc. He snatches it out of the air and rubs the fine cloth between his fingers, his smile positively smug and delighted— she drops the glove as if it's burned her and shakes her head quickly, but it's barely half a breath between that moment and her often visited memory of the turn of his head, the line of his neck, the way his shoulders relax minutely as he breathes in the air he knows, and from there too quickly to his voice, half bravado, half genuinely unsure: 'I will do poorly at this, you realize?'

It is too fast for her to stop, a bounce from one shared moment to the next through whatever association can be grasped, and all are newly attended by the tiniest of feelings. Barely there, unnamed, unexamined, given birth by the voice through the crystal, by Thor's grief, it touches her memory thread by thread and says, wordlessly: 'this is what you have now.'

And Alexandrie reaches urgently outward in an attempt to grasp the hand Thor had offered her, suddenly struggling to remain standing.

[thorndergod]

He sees the breaking as it happens and reaches for her, reaching out to catch her.

"Here. Here, my lady." Thor pulls her in, supporting her as best he can. This is what is left. His father might be alive or might not be. His mother is gone, his brother is gone. House Asgard might be him and one Orlesian woman who didn't even get to the point of making her vows, and he's in territory that calls him enemy, as their allies prepare to attack his home. He is very nearly alone, and she is as well.

"I..." Words fail him. Loki's valet is watching silently and Thor recovers enough to snap his fingers at the elf. "Wine for her. Ale for me. My sitting room." And then, more gently to Lexie: "Let us move. We will fall back and regroup."

[coquettish_trees]

She doesn't want to. Retreat means acknowledgement that there is something to retreat from, which there isn't. There isn't. What poor evidence do they have? Ashes? Bones? Artifacts? Nothing. It's nothing. Falsehood, to get the Watch to stop looking. Trickery, to get whoever had kidnapped them to stop looking as they made their way back.

He was too clever, too skillful, too elusive. Fools, all, to believe at least he'd not gotten away. At least he— but she still needs Thor's support to walk, still nods numbly and acquiesces, still follows.

[thorndergod]

Selfishly he's thankful that he has someone else to look after. If it was just him, he'd likely be curled up in the wine cellar drinking his way through the stores. The thought still appeals, frankly.

Gently he guides Lexi to one of the finely tooled leather chairs, and when the valet comes Thor takes the drinks and sets them down for the both of them, following that up with the order for more. The whole bottle, the whole cask. He, at least, does not intend to stay sober or upright or functioning for long. Tomorrow he can see to details, but tonight is for raw pain.

He sits down himself now and searches for words, finally coming up with "I hate the South" before resting his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands. It's not really accurate to how he's feeling, but there's nebulous hate and anger and it's easier to go there rather than break down further.

[coquettish_trees]

She says nothing to counter him, nor will she touch the wine, sure that the relaxation of it would let something terrible out. The awful, flattening, uprooting storm that she presses back with the desperate rigidity of her denial. If Thor curves over, Alexandrie sits even straighter. Finally after a long moment she speaks, tight through a clenched throat.

"You cannot kill the South." Fate, 'the South', whatever gods he believes in; swinging at those is swinging at wind. Slicing through water. No shock of flesh and bone to carry up your arms to satisfy. Corypheus, though. The Venatori. The most hospitable Baron Deshaies.

"Hate something that will bleed."