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 ]

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[coquettish_trees]

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.