open | your baddest behavior

[cozen]

WHO: Alexandrie, Bastien, Byerly, and their captive audience
WHAT: Mandatory etiquette and dance lessons
WHEN: Justinian 15, 9:45
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: See the OOC post and IC announcement for more information! If you didn't sign up, you can still participate in Parts A and D, and just handwave the other two, without needing to sign up or get an assignment. If you want to do B and C, you can find your own dance partner/seating group OOC, or you can sign up now and we'll dole out new assignments if we get enough latecomers to do so. If you signed up and are missing from the lists when you shouldn't be, I'm sorry and please tell me!

disclaimer: event less fancy than pictured

Seating Assignments
— Table One: Gwenaëlle, Iorveth, Matthias, Athessa
— Table Two: Flint, Ilias, Darras, Med Seller, Yngvi
— Table Three: Julius, Thranduil, Anders, Brienne
— Table Four: Benedict, Colin, Valentine, Six, Derrica
— Table Five: Teren, Salvio, Bartimaeus, Osana
— Table Six: Freddie, Petrana, Kain, Merrill, Silver
— Table Seven: Yseult, Cosima, Steve, Inessa
— Table Eight: Sidony, Fifi, Nell, Fingon
— Table Nine: Thor, Nathaniel H., Solas, Skadi

Dance Partners
— Cosima & Nathaniel H.
— Athessa & Anders
— Teren & Flint
— Freddie & Bartimaeus
— Yseult & Darras
— Nell & Julius
— Merrill & Colin
— Skadi & Benedict
— Gwenaëlle & Solas
— Petrana & Salvio
— Osana & the Medicine Seller
— Sidony & Matthias
— Six & Thranduil
— Brienne & Valentine
— Fifi & Steve
— Thor & Fingon
— Ilias & Iorveth

Comments

[exequy]

“No,” Kostos says instead of answering the question, while he makes perfunctory arrangements to his arms.

The points can fuck off, along with their smug dispensers and the entire exercise, but going off book sounds like something that would both potentially prolong it and put him out of his depth, so: no.

He glances sideways to see what the nearest pair is doing, unwilling to start unless they have, while he adds, “Unless that was innuendo, in which case—“ A pause to return his attention to her for evaluation, brief but brazen, and he knows full well that wasn’t what she meant. “—sure.”

[heirring]

She is just in the process of minding her own business and thinking wistfully along the lines of, Well, I suppose one can't have everything, with respect to that utterly definitive no, when the rest reaches past the business of making small rearrangements to the fall of her skirts and the angle in which her feet are pointed. Blanked faced, Wysteria takes in the reality of the once over. It takes a moment more for the meaning to register.

"--Pardon?" she squawks in the same instant the heel of the staff begins its clunk, clunk, clunking on the stone floor.

'And a one, and a two, and a three--'

[exequy]

The clacking staff is well-matched to the way Kostos leads—pulls, if required—Wysteria into motion. He can keep time, he knows what he’s doing, he’s never been clumsy, but it’s all proficiency, zero art.

No secret enjoyment lurks under the surface. It isn’t not bullshit just because he doesn’t suck at it.

Meanwhile.

“If that was innuendo,” he repeats, enunciating in a way that only makes his accent heavier, “then sure. Or should I rephrase?”

[heirring]

For maybe the first time in her entire life - excepting perhaps a particularly horrendous hour during her second cousin Maebella's wedding, in which a certain woebegone member of the second-cousin-in-law's wedding party had both refused to dance with anyone else and refused to be convinced to put his two left feet anywhere other than on top of her perfectly well-matched ones -, it does require dragging to get Wysteria in motion of the dance floor. The angle of her arm is quite rigid, all grace (the gift of cheerfulness and enthusiasm) shed as if it's a wrap he's stripped from straight off her shoulders.

Do not think about stripping anything from anywhere.

Wysteria croaks indignantly. She can feel the back of her neck growing very warm and swears it will not - absolutely is disallowed - from spreading to her face. "No!" Which is not a yelp, though she does lower her volume to the level of appalled hiss afterward. "No, that's quite all right." And then for good measure, in place of stomping on his foot because she is a good-natured and agreeable sort of person who wouldn't hurt a fly, and most definitely didn't finally escape her second cousin's new relation by accidentally kneeing him somewhere delicate: "I would prefer that you didn't."

[exequy]

“That I didn’t rephrase,” Kostos asks—and if the initial offer to duck out of the lesson was 80% sincere, the offer to rephrase 60%, this question reaches a low of 40% or so, as low as he’s willing to go—“or that I didn’t suggest it at all?”

That he tugs her in closer is, genuinely, due to the fact that another overly-foot-focused couple orbits close enough to threaten collision.

[heirring]

That she allows herself to be tugged closer without elbowing him in the gut is because she is likable and kind and has not because she's slightly off balance between the effort of keeping time, in step, and the vibrant red flush of outrage from creeping all the way up the back of her neck and into her tips of her ears. The moment she has leverage (blessedly out of trampling range from the aforementioned partnership), Wysteria straightens her arms and locks the joint of her elbow to jam distance back between them.

"The second one. And I would encourage you not to make such a-- such an overture again."

[exequy]

He twitches his eyebrows upwards in an assenting way—a way that means yes, fine, and also means he hardly cares, except for the fact that the long minutes of this stupid dance lesson still stretching out into the future are now going to be that much more intolerably dull, with scattered moments of nauseating irritation when he glimpses Nell's red hair across the floor and nothing else at all.

The counting continues. One of the Orlesians demonstrates a skip step, and Kostos manages to do it while looking like he would rather fall on a sword, and then he says, "What was your name, again?"

(He remembers her name.)

[heirring]

"Wyster-- Miss Poppell." A hasty correction made between one hopping step and another. Of all the people to be on a first name basis with. She veers almost as quickly off from that topic and she does out of the path of an oncoming couple:

"You must be the younger one. Of the pair. Am I right?"

[exequy]

His face darkens as fast as a candle blown out. The dance nearly comes to a halt, evidenced by the first stutter of his feet while he wobbles on the verge of making a scene.

It isn’t the commentary—accusation—about their birth order. Not entirely. A month ago that would have been irritating the way everything else is irritating and no more. But since then they’ve nearly killed one another in the garden, and all of that, and they aren’t a pair. Kostos hardly knows him. Now he doesn’t want to.

None of that is Miss Poppell’s business.

And he doesn’t make a scene. He swerves back in time to smile, in a tightlipped and humorless way. He’s never been good at not drawing people a helpful road map to his buttons. For example:

“Why? Because he’s taller?” By the worst two inches in all of Thedas. But he does look a little more pleased about the second option. “Or is it the degeneracy?”

[heirring]

See, give her a few turns about the floor and she's perfectly capable of finding her footing. To say that she brightens in the face of his grim smile wouldn't be completely accurate, but--

Well.

She smiles in return. "Is he taller? I don't know that I've ever seen you both stand next to one another to compare."