open: lol never mind.

[cozen]

WHO: Open!
WHAT: A memorial that doesn’t go as planned.
WHEN: Justinian 1
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Nah.

The ceremony takes place in one of the side courtyards that’s been converted into a garden, where the oppressive architecture is offset with flowers and trees. There’s a small pyre, for those whose traditions call for pyres, but no bodies to burn. Instead there are tokens, flowers, favorite foods, treasured possessions—not yet lit.

(For the others, the Dalish and Nevarrans and anyone else with a different wish, their friends and family will have made different arrangements alongside the pyre, probably, if they aren’t universally reviled.)

Anyone who wants to speak, whether it’s a prepared speech or a single spontaneous sentence, can do so. The tone is respectful but only so solemn. It’s been more than a week. For many, the worst of the shock has passed, and the sun has continued to rise and set, and there’s room between bouts of misery for fond memories and occasionally laughter. The memorial is a door that’s closing—slowly, kindly—and tomorrow, on the other side of it, the war will continue.

Today, on this side, the only people judging anyone else for crying are the assholes.

***

Across the harbor, more than a dozen filthy and tired people come to a stop on the docks, and the loitering ferryman pauses to take stock of them, then starts laughing. There isn’t even any local mythology about ferrymen and the dead. It’s just that funny to him on its own, that he’s been rowing miserable people around all week, and here’s the source of all that misery, dirty and tired but significantly less dead than believed.

When he stops laughing, he offers to dunk everyone in the harbor before rowing them over. For the smell, you know. No one is going to be happy to see them if their eyes are watering too much to actually see them. Then he laughs some more at his hilarious joke.

But he does eventually load up his boat—and maybe there isn’t room for everyone all at once, maybe some dramatic reunions will be delayed, maybe some people will be even more fashionably late to their funeral than the others—and carries everyone across the bay, still chuckling intermittently.

***

In the courtyard, the speeches and anecdotes (and singing, perhaps) wind down to long silences peppered with murmurs or sniffling. Someone is preparing to light the pyre. And then the gate creaks open.

Comments

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie is absorbed in her numb staring until the loud ringing Who died? For a moment, her eyebrows lower in irritation. For a moment she refuses to dignify the heckle with a look. But then there's murmuring, sounds of shock and surprise that grow rather than ebb, and she does look. And then, like a loosed arrow, she's disappeared from Thor's side into the crowd beginning to turn towards the entrance to the courtyard. She trips on her hem more than once, attention focused entirely on scanning the slowly straggling line of the missing and--

Glittering with the enchanted gold of the embroidery against darker emerald and somehow managing a flat sprint despite the more restrictive Tevene silhouette of the gown, she'll slam into his chest hard enough to drive out breath, her own ragged with both emotion and exertion, the wrap of her arms like a vise.

No such luck indeed.

[hwaaaitsme]

At once he goes from standing, staring, to being assaulted, to crashing backwards to the ground. The whole weight of Alexandrie, hurled at him as sharply as she is capable of tips him back in a perfect arc until he is flat on the cobblestones. He gasps, trying to reclaim some of the breath she has knocked out of him, only to lose it again as he looks down at her.

That is a very fine dress and one that is clearly wildly inappropriate for a funeral...unless one is a particularly decadent widow about to murder a series of increasingly powerful men. He can only hope that was the case--shit, he is lost in thought.

"I am...underdressed," Loki says, wheezes really, and his apologetic but somewhat roguish smile is undercut by his filthy his face is and the fact that his hair is currently draped inelegantly across half of it.

[coquettish_trees]

Her wrist bones are undoubtedly bruised at the very least, trapped between Loki's upper back and the stones of the courtyard after taking the weight of their combined fall. The wash of that pain combined with the familiarity of his smile, and the rough wheeze of his voice, and the quip it's used for pierces the numbness of her shock and leaves her trembling atop their inelegant (and entirely socially inappropriate) pile with both breathless laughter and finally--finally--the tears she'd been too empty to shed.

She drops her head into his chest and shakes it back and forth, muffling the dual expression of her hysterics. Close now, Alexandrie smells like warm vanilla and flowers and summer trysts--the same scent she'd been wearing when they met. He smells like days on the road with no opportunity to wash and underground must and something acrid and truly awful that she's never even experienced before.

She laugh-sobs into him and doesn't make any move to escape it.

"You smell terrible."

[hwaaaitsme]

Loki lets out a huff of laughter and his expression goes both wry and a bit fond as he eyes her. She is smearing her own makeup and rewetting the filth on his shirt. She will ruin her face in short order and he cannot bring himself to tell her as much.

"I am captured and forced to trudge half of Thedas and that is the first thing you say to me?"

Of course it is, because he does smell very terrible, but that is beside the point. He sniffs a bit indignantly.

"At least you dressed very well for my memorial," Loki commends her in a tone that fails at haughtiness only by dint of the wheeze in his voice and the fact that they are lying on the ground in the courtyard. "I presume you are armed?"

[coquettish_trees]

"You may check when we get home," Alexandrie replies, raising her face to look at him. The promise is made far less seductive by the thickness of her voice, the sniffle that follows it immediately, the smudges of dirt and who knows what else she heedlessly transferred from his shirt to both the tip of her nose and along her cheek.

"I will have thought of something finer to say by the time we get there."

They really ought to get up. She doesn't try.

[hwaaaitsme]

"That will require standing," He reminds her and glances down at her arms, which have not even begun to loosen their vice-grip around him. He is not complaining, but he can hardly maneuver upright if it means forcing her arms apart, can he?

He arches a brow but makes no further comment as he looks down at her smudged, and tear-stained, happy face. He is more than slightly comforted by the fact that they are, both of them, utterly unpresentable now.

"Come, I want to burn these clothes as soon as possible. If you don't hurry that lovely dress may become a casualty as well."

[coquettish_trees]

"Ah, well. That cannot be borne," she returns lightly, relaxing her grip as encouraged to. Despite the necessity, it is reluctant; even as Alexandrie finds space to awkwardly shift to where she can kneel and then slowly make her way to her feet alongside Loki, it'll be apparent that there is little chance she will let go of him entirely. This is absurdly illustrated; once he is standing, she reaches to straighten his collar. A useless gesture, there's no saving the appearance of any of it, but it is more to continue to touch him than any true attempt to do so. She smiles, brilliant beneath the mess she's made of herself.

"It has its intended purpose to fulfill again."

[hwaaaitsme]

It's a cryptic statement and Loki, admittedly, is not at the top of his game. He regards her a bit curiously and then her dress. It is a fine one, Tevinter styled, and would likely have taken well over the amount of time she had thought him gone. It couldn't be for mourning.

Aaaah.

The flicker of curiosity shifts, quick as lightning, to something impressed, then fond, then back to pleased. No one but her would know to look that closely at the set of his features.

"You do paint the dramatic picture in that dress, I'm almost sad you won't be slaying my enemies in it," Loki laments. "We shall have to settle for it becoming a wedding dress."

[coquettish_trees]

Flitting across Alexandrie's face in return, a voiceless dialogue in miniature: Patient amusement for his curiosity, triumph when the connection is made, for his fondness, a glance through her lashes that actually borders on maidenly, and a fond warmth of her own to end on.

"A fine idea," she agrees as if it had been, in fact, his. "Although to the first, perhaps I shall not have as much difficulty as other brides figuring out what it shall be worn for afterwards." It's said almost sweetly, but there's the dark sound of blood in her mouth beneath it as she tucks herself under Loki's arm, providing support in a way easily mistaken for her seeking comfort.

Report of his death greatly exaggerated as it may have been, he'd been taken, she'd bled for it, and she means to have recompense.