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

[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."