faderift | open | grief is the thing with feathers

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 ]

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Alexandrie shakes her head slightly. "Only that." A pause follows, and she turns to consider her work again.

"How funny it is," she remarks softly. "When I fully expect to spend the rest of my life without ever seeing someone again, here they are. When I fully expect to see them again, they are gone forever." The breeze catches beneath the pinned sketch for a moment, lifting it a little like a sail. If it were larger, perhaps it would fly away.

"I hardly blame you for keeping him to yourself. It would have been a poor reunion were it not desired, and there are few things so discouraging as reacquainting yourself with an old friend and immediately learning your confidences shall not be kept.

"Had the two of you remained in some contact, or did I sunder us all?" The question holds none of her usual self-indulgent recrimination, only absent interest, as if Alexandrie cannot even summon the emotion necessary to feel guilty.

Edited (proofread maybe) 2019-05-25 18:20 (UTC)

"Maker preserve me," he responds, though not entirely to her question. He and Bastien...No. They hadn't seen each other. But that was as much out of professional caution as it was out of some extinct companionship. To be an effective spy, especially one in deep cover, one needed to stay out of the sightline of those who could recognize one as rather more than a fool. And Bastien could most certainly do that. Besides, he'd been pent up in Ferelden until recently.

"Sometimes, Lexie, you're more of a martyr than Andraste herself." The reprimand is gentle, but no less frank for all that. "You are not to blame for every ill in the world."

"No, not every ill," she agrees. "But some."

This particular one.

"I should not be as effective as she, in any case," she continues, unpinning the sketch and peeling both it and the charcoal paper beneath up and over to check for missed lines. "Little enough would change, I think, were I tied to the stake and—" burned.

Ashes, they'd said. Ashes and bones.

Alexandrie pauses there, stilled in time, her hand and the papers still raised.

He observes her faltering, and gives her a moment to recover. When she doesn't, he says, smoothly, "Perhaps so. Or perhaps many things would change. I suppose it would all depend on how fine the story they told afterwards was. What did you die for? What came after? Who observed your death? Who was moved? Who was indifferent? All these things can combine for a fine story that inspires. And that is how a woman lives forever."

Another moment, then he prompts her, "Go on. I should like to see this finished."

And, slowly, time begins again.

"Such immortality is poor consolation," she says finally, finishing the removal and rolling both pages away into the scroll case leaning against the other side of her hair. "I cannot take a bottle of wine to visit with a story, no matter its quality. It can move a crowd, carry a country to victory, but it cannot be my croquet partner, or bring me lovely outlandish sketches for dresses, or remind me curtly that I am being foolish, or take tea weekly, or play a minuet."

Alexandrie unlatches her case of paints, begins lifting out the ones she will need for her mixing. "Is it strange," she muses, after a moment, "that I would rather live and love and be forgotten? Selfish, that I would ask for it?" Then, without waiting for an answer, "If you wish to see it finished, you shall be here a long while."

Edited 2019-05-26 02:55 (UTC)

"It's very Fereldan." He murmurs that with a bit of drollness, but the sentiment is actually quite sincere. "You'd have done well, I think, to be born to my country, rather than yours. As Orlesians love fame, the Dog-lords love running in packs."

He tucks a hand into his pocket. "Perhaps that makes us selfish. Then again, Andraste was one of ours. So who knows?"

Here, usually, would go some manner of 'how dare you', but not today.

"Perhaps I would have." She is measuring, mixing, the palette knife held deftly in her hand, paging through memory for the color of his skin in light and shadow. Gone now, save for there. She will put it back into the world as best she can.

"What should my name have been, do you think? Were I born the fifth daughter of an Arl."

He shrugs with one shoulder, smiles vaguely upwards.

"I knew an Alexandra. Perhaps you could be that. I don't think you'd need to change so very much."

"No?" she inquires, looking up from her process briefly, "Am I very Fereldan?" In white and lace, gloved, standing with cultivated delicacy, her wide-brimmed hat set firmly atop her upswept curls with pearl-tipped pins, painted as a porcelain doll.

The lines are slightly different—someone else had applied that paint this morning.

He doesn't look at her. Instead, he casts his gaze upwards.

"Do we seem so uncouth, that it strikes you as impossible?"

“You seem so sturdy that it does.”

She’d seen Queen Anora once. Where Celene glided on air, the earth seemed to reach up into Anora with each step she took. Unmovable, not because she twisted out of the way of all things and seemed unstrikable, but because striking her would mean a shattered sword. For all her willful stubborness, Alexandrie is fire and air.

“I feel a twist of gilt paper. A feather. A silk scarf the wind has taken.”

His voice is rather dry. "And in our country, we have gilt paper, and feathers, and silk scarves." He shakes his head. "There's a place for anyone and everyone in Ferelden. So long as you carry your weight."

It had become present-tense, a near offer of that place. Perhaps with the Gallows sundered from Skyhold, its power halved, it was no longer enough to hold Ferelden’s interest.

The quiet scrape of her knife ceases and she looks up at him with clear sad eyes.

“Are you leaving?”

He doesn't look at her. Instead, he just smiles, the curl of his lips unreadable.

"Why would I leave?"

The knife starts again, until it is mixed—if not to her satisfaction, at least not to her dissatisfaction—and she sets it down to pick through her brushes instead.

“I cannot play with you, mon cher.”

I am too tired, it says. Everything has fallen apart.

“Tell me a story that I shall know is one instead. How you met Bastien, perhaps.” Alexandrie manages a small ghost of a smile for the idea, for it had been a perennial source of amusement. She would ask, and one day they would have been unlucky stowaways on the same ship to Val Royeaux, the next dueling over the affections of a woman they quite forgot in the good will cultivated whilst swinging swords at one another. Once, they met when they both cheated the same hand of unique cards at Wicked Grace and had to flee together. She had even once tried cornering them separately, only to receive the same story word for word from both, different from all the rest.

At least it will be something she never expects to hear the right of.

Alexandrie fills the brush with paint.

open | grief is the thing with feathers

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