faderift | closed | how do you solve a problem like

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closed | how do you solve a problem like

WHO: Kitty and Lexie
WHAT: Two girls discussing one idiot
WHEN: after Kitty's return from this fun excursion
WHERE: Jeshavis office
NOTES: none

When someone comes to visit her, they knock. Alexandrie insists on it. Alexandrie makes her intended knock (although it is largely because she likes the way he does it). If there is to be propriety nowhere else on this island, it will have one last bastion in the offices of Project Jeshavis. Perhaps even more important than propriety, the pacing and force of someone's request for entrance gives her shades of information about the manner of meeting she's about to have.

There is, however, a single exemption to this rule, and she is approaching the door at this very moment.

Kitty's moods need no such barometer to be read.

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She stomps in, making a truly remarkable amount of noise for a girl this skinny, face stormy. She's been out for a while - and likely Lexie, in her position of authority, knows some of the details of the trip - but she's hardly wasted any time in coming to Lexie to complain.

"Tevinters," Kitty declares, "are rotten bastards."

It must be noted that Lexie was not Kitty's first choice, on the basis of the fact that she might have dissenting opinions regarding the bastardry of the people of Tevinter. But Gwen wasn't in her room. So.

Her fiancé being, on occasion, a rotten bastard, Alexandrie makes no argument and simply puts aside her pen and lofts her eyebrows—go on.

"So first off - " Kitty does, of course, go on; she would go on with or without that invitation - "Benedict's mum is working for Corypheus. And since he loves his wonderful, torturing, psychotic mum so much, I guess he is, too."

Alexandrie's lips press together and a soft sigh escapes through her nose. She'd been afraid of that. Of Benedict, so very vulnerable to his desire for approval, behind the lines where House Artemaeus remained in power.

Her chair makes a quiet noise as she rises from behind her desk to make her way to one of the two chairs facing it, angling the seat towards its twin before she resettles herself.

"He stayed, then."

Kitty scoffs loudly, crossing her arms and slumping down in her chair.

"Like an idiot."

She tucks her ankle.

"Unfortunate. For all of us." Benedict included. "Who else knows?"

"I told Thranduil. S'ppose I ought to tell Flint, too, what with him being head of forces now and all, just in case someone ends up needing to murder Benedict on the battlefield."

She slumps down a little further. "Dunno. Who else?"

The deflation of Kitty's energy and her slide into the chair stop the forward tick of Alexandrie's thoughts, and she pauses to look at her again. Differently. As a friend, rather than someone to be reported to. Kitty and Benedict had perennially fought and bickered, which was unsurprising. But so too had the two women, and they had grown a friendship which Alexandrie cherished deeply.

It had been a mission of a personal nature, and he'd gone with Kitty. So.

"Never mind that." It's softer, kinder. "What happened?"

With one toe, she scuffs at the ground. And she keeps her eyes trained on that toe as it drags along. She doesn't meet Alexandrie's eyes. How can she?

"I mean, that's really what happened," Kitty answers. Then a shrug. "That's the whole thing. We went up there to get back Micaela, the woman who raised him, and then he decided it'd be grand to stay behind."

It's... difficult. Alexandrie lets her face show the hesitation, the gentle conflict, just in case Kitty does eventually look up.

"A quick choice born of fear and conflicted loyalties does not make this the final truth of him, Kitty," she replies carefully. "And it does not mark you as having failed." For that, she reaches out to lay a hand on Kitty's knee, soft but present.

"We spoke once in the library, during whatever it was that made everyone so horribly forthcoming. He thought himself a failure, unworthy of his position as heir to House Artemaeus. He seemed doggedly determined to correct this, whatever the discomfort it caused to him. I admit it shamed me, turned as I have been toward selfish things rather than keeping the people of Val Fontaine always closest to my heart as I once did long ago." She looks down at her hand, at the shine of the ring she had asked to keep even after its rightful owner had returned. Choices. Raises her eyes again.

"But I am a fifth daughter. I do not pray, but if I did, it would be to never hear myself addressed as Comtesse. I stand deep in the wings of my family, and thus have movement and choice available to me that Matthias does not. I may be somewhat of a shame," her lips twitch with self-aware mirth, "but I will not be the ruin of the De La Fontaine name. Benedict stands just off-stage, waiting for his cue. He does it alone, the sole heir of the family, and while he may know that there is another script that may be spoken than the one his mother has placed in his hands over and over again since his birth, I do not think he knows how to speak it. I do not think he knows how to split from what it is he has been given, been raised to, bound tight to. I think he is torn between service to his family, and what the small voice inside him—the growth of which I am sure you have encouraged—says is right.

"And so we must help him, you and I."

Kitty, though, doesn't meet Alexandrie's eyes. There's no dawning light of compassion in her eyes and face. Instead, her lips get tighter and tighter. It's not the best story to tell, this tale of noble expectations and the weight of the family name. Not to staunchly, defiantly proletarian Kitty Jones. Kitty's own biases just make her all the more determined to dismiss the tale.

And so she is dismissive. "I suppose I don't know anything about that. But I am my parents' only daughter, and they had all grand ambitions for me, too. And when they screwed me over, I told them to piss off. It's really not that hard."

It's not that Alexandrie expected Kitty to be moved by such things so much as she'd once promised to be honest. She knows what she might say, by now, but it is something of a matter of pride that she refuses to come by Kitty's approval in any way save truly.

"Have you never found something that seemed simple to another to be terribly difficult?" is Alexandrie's reply, her shoulders raising slightly in a shrug. "Found yourself laboring beneath tightly held beliefs you considered inviolable that another seemed to ignore entirely?"

"This isn't like that," Kitty says, and finally looks up. What that is is clear by the flash of passion in her eyes and the stubborn set of her jaw. That is, of course, the core of her tightly held beliefs: the fight for justice and equality.

"That's about doing what's right. This is about him being too weak to be able to stand up to a monster - a complete monster." One hand clenches. "She hurt me, and hurt him, and he was still acting like a lapdog begging for a treat. This isn't like fighting to help others - it's like fighting for the right to get kicked around again."

"A complete monster who successfully holds a seat in the Magisterium, Kitty," Alexandrie insists gently. "I admire you, for your escape of your parents, but you will forgive me, I hope, if I do not believe them to have been forged in a cauldron of manipulation, blackmail, and subterfuge that runs near apace with the Great Game of Orlais. If she is the manner of woman I believe her to be, she will have twisted and groomed him to obedience all his life, made sure she was author of every thought he believed he came to himself. Trained him in a hundred tiny imperceptible ways to fear her, cleave to her will, and perhaps even begin to believe it love and support."

Alexandrie had played long games before. Wrought the delicate and slowly constricting web of years around others, forging them into pieces she could control. It had taken five years, once, setting up the intricacies that would collapse a small pocket of her dedicated rivals at court and grant her father a very influential contract in the bargain with only enough of her hand showing in it to impress anyone who had been watching. A long game. But children are the longest game of all.

It makes her ill, now, such a thought.

"Did she give him the time or space to think?" she asks, "Or rather did she stress and press him, perhaps whilst proving herself a dire threat to you, such that he would panic and be more likely to act on the instinct she forged?"

"He had plenty of time to think," Kitty replies hotly. "He got that note, and I said to him, hey, this is a trap, you know. Which, if his mum had been forged-in-a-cauldron-of-blah-blah, he ought to have known himself. But he insisted - insisted, when it wasn't just me he was putting at risk, but also Micaela. But no, he wanted to go off to - to kiss her stupid hand."

Kitty shakes her head, tense and furious.

"He made this choice."

Alexandrie sighs quietly, folding and setting aside her thoughts as she might with embroidery to begin anew.

"He did. And so the question becomes only if he is a member of Riftwatch trapped behind enemy lines or if he is a true traitor. Either way he has too much of value to be left there, and something will needs be done to reclaim him. Or kill him. I suppose it depends on which story we choose to believe."

Kitty's gaze jerks up at that, alarm clear in her face. It's there for just one moment before she shoves it away again, controlling her expression and favoring Lexie with a shrug.

"What value?"

"Our guest lists, from his tenure as Chamberlain," Alexandrie counts on her fingers, "The tactical information that comes from living and working with the members of a small organization. The state of the defenses of the city, the state of our funding, our armory, our relationship with the Inquisition, with the Chantry. Who our Rifters are, what abilities and knowledge they may have brought to our world." She lifts her hand. "He carries a shard. With a willing or broken shardbearer, perhaps they are able to beat us to a Rift, to begin their own recruiting. Perhaps they even begin to open Rifts to cause chaos in battle—I heard rumor once that a young woman with a shard mistakenly achieved such a feat at Skyhold some years ago."

A pause, and Alexandrie thins her lips in concern, turns her head to look at the curtains moving in the breeze.

"You are disappointed," she says softly. "Angry. Betrayed. And... perhaps I should have been a better friend if I allowed you to yell for a bit, as Gigi does me, when I am so. But you have always struck me as a woman who finds better solace in taking action.

So. What is it you think we ought to do?"

"Of course I like action better," Kitty mutters, which is true, and which is not true. In most cases, yes. But in this instance - Well. This instance is...complicated.

So she looks back down again, and resumes scuffing at the ground with her toes, as though she can rub away some layer of dirt and see some truth underneath. After a moment, she says, "Killing him would be - easier. It's easier to kill someone than capture them alive."

"It is," Alexandrie grants, rising from her chair and moving to the corner of the room to pour them glasses of the chilled fruit juice waiting on a small side-table there for just such a need. She returns, offering the glass low enough that Kitty will see it. Sometimes it's comforting to have something to do with ones hands.

"But I did not ask which would be simpler."

"We're not supposed to be sentimental, though, are we?" Kitty rolls the glass between her hands - not drinking it yet, just watching the juice glass as it rotates between her palms.

"Decisions are supposed to be made...rationally. We're supposed to think about what's simpler."

"Are we not also meant to think about what is best?" Perhaps not, as soldiers. But Alexandrie is not a fine soldier.

"As someone who has been let to discover a large gulf between what it is she desires and what it is she is meant to desire..." She spreads her hands, her own glass held lightly in one.

"The heart will have her say eventually. Let her have it now when we two are speaking, safe and with less sharp consequence to our words, rather than on the field of battle when one must do, and can ill afford time to listen." Softly then. "Or in the time that stretches after, when one has all the time to listen and there is nothing to be done for what one hears."

And so Kitty falls silent for a long moment. She stares down at the ground, picking at a fingernail, gnawing on her lower lip, thinking.

Finally, she speaks.

"I want - him not to be hurt for it," she says, quietly. "But...I don't know if that's because that's right, and moral, or if it's just that I don't have the stomach to hurt him. It's - " She lets out a slow breath. "He did help me. I'd be dead if he didn't intervene. But that probably means that I haven't got the right to judge him, 'cause that makes my judgment compromised."

"What judgment can be worse for knowing more of a man?"

Alexandrie tilts her head as she asks, a small smile of encouragement on her lips in case Kitty should happen to look up.

"Any judgments. All judgments." She sighs, and doesn't look up quite yet. "You get emotional, don't you. And that's not a good thing."

Her eyebrows raise.

"I grant that being overwhelmed by the truth of ones own heart can be... detrimental." Wry self-awareness seeps into Alexandrie's voice, her mind making quick unbidden tally of the myriad of times she had been so overcome. The fallout. "But I think it perhaps equally blinding to attempt to set that truth wholly aside in the pursuit of an impartiality that I do not believe may truly be had."

She pauses for a moment before asking: "The young man whose life you chose to preserve. Would you have done so, did you know less of him?"

Kitty answers that with a scoff. "I'd probably have been less likely to do it if I'd known more about him." Which isn't true, and she knows it's not true, and she expect Lexie knows it's not true. So she huffs a sigh, and amends herself - "Doing that wasn't about him. Not really. It was about - me, and what was right. All I knew about him was that my mum and dad would have cut off their own little fingers for the opportunity to claim him as their son in my place. And that he was power-hungry. And a liar."

She slumps down a little in her chair. "I know Benedict better than I ever knew Mandrake. At least back there."

She does know, and knows Kitty knows, and thus there's no need to touch on it.

"So. Knowing what you do, what do you think right? For yourself and your sense of such things, not him."

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