closed | how do you solve a problem like

[coquettish_trees]

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.

Comments

[coquettish_trees]

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."

[rathercommon]

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?"

[coquettish_trees]

"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?"

[rathercommon]

"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."

[coquettish_trees]

"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."

[rathercommon]

"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."

[coquettish_trees]

"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."

[rathercommon]

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."

[coquettish_trees]

"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.

[rathercommon]

"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."

[coquettish_trees]

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?"

[rathercommon]

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."

[coquettish_trees]

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."