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.

[keenly]

There's a guest arriving at the Asgards' house. He doesn't break down until Alexandrie arrives to greet him, staggering forward into her arms.

[coquettish_trees]

There's nothing for it but to catch him, although it will not be in the pliant soft warmth of her usual embrace. She holds him woodenly, like an artist's manikin posed to allow them to practice the drawing of comfort.

[keenly]

His grip, in return, is needy, seeking comfort more than giving. But an embrace and a mutual cry are comforting for both parties, aren't they? In his abject grief, Colin doesn't notice that Alexandrie isn't crying. He's never going to see Anders again. That's the only thing he can think of right now, although it isn't thinking so much as a visceral cry of protest.

He pulls away eventually, wiping at his face, having absorbed her lack of reaction by now. There's no judging her for it. Everyone reacts in their own way, deals in their own way, but he still feels the need to apologize.

"I'm sorry," he chokes, as if he's being too much of a bummer.

[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]

"You need not be," she murmurs, "come in and have some tea."

It's like watching a music box. Her turn towards the downstairs parlor is graceful, as is her gesture to a waiting servant to begin preparations, the extension of her hand to Colin in invitation to take it; her walk is a court glide, straight and tall with her head held high. A perfect moving sculpture of Orlesian nobility, hollow of its spark.

[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.

[keenly]

"I can't believe he's gone. It hardly seems real. Anders. Sidony. I knew Kitty, too, though we weren't close. I just can't believe they're gone."

His breath hitches and holds as another torrent of tears threatens.

[coquettish_trees]

The parlor is lit by sun filtering in through the filmy drapes of cloth that adorn the high arched windows—the weather had refused to attend the announcement. The sun keeps shining. The birds sing. The trees rustle with the gentle breeze. Nature is heartless.

Alexandrie flinches at Kitty's name, her fingers limp for a moment in Colin's, her step uneven, but she lengthens again and pulls to gently draw him down beside her onto one of the plush seats to turn her knees toward him and regard him with the very convincing appearance of all the sympathy in the world. Or it would be, but within the perfect mask of it her eyes are fever-bright and dilated and empty of the lively turn of her thoughts. She is absent from her own gaze, even as her eyebrows tilt in sympathy.

Garden!

[bouchonne]

"Who's your subject?" Byerly's voice is soft. He leans against a nearby tree - rather too frail a thing to be leaned against, simple sapling that it is, so that it bows slightly under his weight. There's a small smile on his lips, but none in his eyes.

[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.

[coquettish_trees]

"You need not dissemble," she replies gently. Byerly and Bastien had been thick as thieves, then. Quite literal ones, she'd always suspected. She's sure, of the two of them, the man she now prepared to paint would have gone to his erstwhile compatriot first. If nothing else, Byerly hadn't been the one who'd ruined everything.

It's a moment before she turns to look, but she does. Alexandrie's face is pale and tired and too serene. She looks as if she might were she standing on a scaffold with a rope around her neck, resigned to her fate, choosing what she would like her last sight of the world to be. Treetops, perhaps. Sky.

"He came and found me whilst the island was afflicted with inconvenient truths." She smiles, small, confined to her lips; a match for Byerly's. "I admit, I was more fooled by his mustaches than I was yours."

Of course, she hadn't been looking—always looking—for Bastien.

[bouchonne]

"It took me a moment to recognize him as well, when he first showed his face." By pauses a moment, then says, "Perhaps I ought to have told you."

It's not an apology - not really. Just an observation. He isn't sorry, after all, for his lack of transparency; that had been during one of their low points, when Bastien had showed up. He had not, precisely, owed her the information. But still. Perhaps he ought to have told her.

"Did you have the opportunity to spend some time with him, at least?"

[coquettish_trees]

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.

[bouchonne]

"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."

[coquettish_trees]

"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.

[bouchonne]

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."

[coquettish_trees]

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."

[bouchonne]

"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?"

day two: jurassic park;

[sarcophage]

There are two unfortunate facts about the Lady's situation. The first: rather than wandering around with his thoughts, and his plans, and his futile impulses, Leander has decided to spend some time working today, which means he is in the library—or moving through it, at least, on his way in and out of his workroom. The second: Leander is always curious enough.

Or perhaps these facts are—in fact—fortunate. We'll see shortly.

And so will she, should she glimpse the shape of a foot in her periphery. Feet. Above them, legs, and above those, the rest of a man, familiar in shape, but uncommonly still. Leander has not sprung forth to greet her on sight, as he would normally do, but now takes the opportunity to watch her from a small distance while she crumbles in distress. The fine fabric surrounding her like icing; the shapes of her hair, gathered or cascading; her face crumpling exquisitely behind her hand.

How beautiful she is.