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

Lowtown Market

[altusimperius]

"Easy," comes the decidedly uneasy admonishment, accompanied by a hand on Lexie's forearm to stop her surging forward or killing anyone.
Of course, it leaves him wide open for whatever she might do with the other arm, but Benedict is trying to prevent a civilian murder and sacrifices must be made.

[coquettish_trees]

No-one in the history of all the world has ever gentled from a rage when commanded, least of all Alexandrie de la Fontaine.

What such a command does manage, nearly always, is to redirect the object of that rage. She's jerking her arm from the unexpected pressure with a indignantly ringing "Je t'interdis de me toucher!" before she even registers whose hand it is (there go the remaining apples), and her hand flickers past her skirts in her turn towards the interloper, coming away accompanied by the glint of steel.

There would likely have been blood on the streets shortly thereafter save for two things.

One: The shape she turns toward registers somewhere as Benedict's, and Benedict as someone she has hurt enough already, and two: In a single sliver of a moment she is fiercely proud of how quick and effortless her reflexive draw has gotten, cannot wait to relay this to her tutor—for she loves dearly the face Loki makes when he is proud of both her and himself—and remembers.

And she stops.

[altusimperius]

Maker, since when did fancy women start carrying daggers?

One would think he'd have learned the signs from enough interactions with Loki, but Benedict still manages to be surprised when Alexandrie whirls on him, and he stumbles a little in his haste to step back away from her, hands raised and eyes wide.

He has the good sense not to speak right away, instead letting her react how she will, his eyes never leaving that blade.

[coquettish_trees]

It doesn't move any further. Neither does Alexandrie, save to slowly wilt as the cut flowers that caused such anger might if they were pulled from the water and left there to curl in on themselves. Left to become limp, then brittle, then crumble to nothing at all.

It won't be long before the market goes on around them, the collective concern fading. The many are unkind that way.

[altusimperius]

When it becomes clearer that she isn't going to stab him, Benedict chances to take a few steps toward her, glancing about at the odd looks and offering his arm. With no idea what she was doing here, he nonetheless thinks it wise to be elsewhere quickly-- "fancy a drink?" he asks, not even bothering to smile.

[coquettish_trees]

The trained Lady in her accepts the offered arm mechanically and follows, not even bothering to compensate for the basket which sits awkwardly between them. Although it hangs less noticeably at her side now, her other hand refuses to give up its grip on the knife. It seems more talisman than weapon this way; not wielded, simply held.

The fallen fruit is forgotten. By Alexandrie, if not the more enterprising.

[altusimperius]

He takes her to a pub that's a little more off the beaten path: still in Hightown, of course, but not so much among the See and Be Seen variety. Neither of them wants to be seen right now.

Walking in while still very much under the pretense that everything is normal, he nods to the host and tugs Lexie along as they're led to a table, where he guides her to her chair (and pulls it out, and pushes it back in, with all the learned gentlemanly airs) before taking his own.
Then he hunches forward, and sighs, and feels the weight of it himself. He doesn't have to ask what's wrong.

[coquettish_trees]

She still murmurs gratitude reflexively. Tucks one ankle behind the other. Smooths her skirts, although it is a longer and more awkward process with only one hand free to do it. A music box dancer, wound and moving as she had been built to.

If Alexandrie still sits tall, it is only because of the strictures of the tightly-laced corset she wears. The most she is allowed is the sag of her shoulders, the bow of her head.

"You have my gratitude," she says, quiet and wooden as the table she addresses.

[altusimperius]

A server comes by, and Benedict orders two glasses of wine without really thinking about it, forgetting almost as soon as he's done it in favor of looking back at Alexandrie.
"I loved him too," he murmurs, low and sheepish, and hoping she won't take it amiss. "...since we were boys."

[coquettish_trees]

Of course he did. Loki would have been older, if not by much, and beautiful in his effortless gliding through water Benedict had admitted to wishing to understand the currents of. The adulation would have been palpable and Loki encouraging of it, following such warmth like the serpent whose form and name he'd taken, magnetic even in his basking.

Little wonder Benedict had so eagerly joined her game; it had meant a chance to sit across the board from him.

Little wonder too that Benedict had carried hurt long past her apology. While Alexandrie scrabbled for purchase internally, having forgotten in her turmoil that she and Loki had planned that very game, Benedict would only have seen that he sat across the board from them both.

A mere handful of months, and a mundane foreigner—an Orlesian—had taken the place he had wished to for years.

She has more sympathy than jealousy. There will be no anger, no hiss, no fluffed feathers. The opposite: a touch of camaraderie in the wan sad flicker of a smile that briefly haunts her lips. Even so, when she reaches for the wine glass that is brought her, she makes no effort to conceal the serpentine gold and emerald glint of the ring on her forefinger that had left Kirkwall on Loki's hand.

"Have you ceased to," she asks softly, after a moment spent in looking at the color of the liquid in the low-light, "that you relegate it to the past?"

[altusimperius]

The significance of the ring isn't lost on Benedict, and even now there's a pang in his heart at the sight of it. But things are different now: or rather, they're the same as they've always been, and only now is he mature enough to recognize it.

"...no," he answers faintly, "but it was..." He looks down at his wine, remembering it's there, and picks it up to take a sip. "...foolish of me. I should have known better."

[coquettish_trees]

"I knew better," is Alexandrie's soft reply as she shifts the wine back and forth in the glass. "I knew the wreckage that follows after trusting the heart, and I knew myself for a fool, and I raged at it, and near wept with that rage, and it changed nothing at all."

She doesn't drink, afraid if she loses any small modicum of her grip on herself she will cry, and if she starts, that she will never stop.

"The heart desires what it desires. I have come to think it more foolish to pretend it might be otherwise."

[altusimperius]

A small, slow nod, and Benedict sips from his wine again, his gaze shifting to stare dismally past her. The heart desires what it desires, and that never seems to be what his head wants.

"And here we both are," he says after a time, "...back where we began."

[coquettish_trees]

"No." It's gentle, for all the confidence with which it's said. "I have come so far from that place as to be unrecognizable to myself. Even if the wheel turns such that the same point is up, the carriage has gone down the road."

[altusimperius]

Her words seem strange at first, but the more Benedict contemplates them, the more he realizes she's right: not just for herself, but for him as well. Years have passed. They're different people now.

Looking at his wine again, he quietly asks, "what will you do now?"

[coquettish_trees]

If you are my poor premature widow, I absolutely insist you make a show of killing my enemies because you've no idea which one managed to kill me. A command made in jest nearly a year ago, birthed from another jest, birthed in turn from a single momentary slip into familiarity on her birthday.

The streets of nations will run red as I send you souls like love letters across the veil as proof of my constancy, she had promised all the same, laughing while his fingers righted her curls.

No jest, now.

"Retaliate at length."