open | it's hot up here

[coquettish_trees]

WHO: Lexie, Colin, Leander, you
WHAT: Catch-all for Lexie including paint, rage, and a generally terrible day at the office made worse.
WHEN: Presently
WHERE: Hightown and the Gallows
NOTES: She may try to get into a fight with every single person here

I. Colin

There is an odd noise, from the studio. A dull repetitive thudding. It's broken every so often by silence, but it always resumes again.

Searching it out yields Alexandrie, kneeling on a raw unstretched canvas that would fit her body should she lie on it and stretch, pounding her paint-covered fist over and over onto it, her breathing labored as she fills the space fist by fist with something vast and dark. The pause comes when she reaches to cover her hand again with pigment.

There is a second pause, to reach for the bottle beside her.


II. Leander

There are rooftops now, of a sort, and buildings beneath them, rendering the vast darkness on her canvas a yet starless sky. She flinches sometimes, when some thought darkens her brow and her hand comes down a little harder, but she makes no attempt to lessen her own force. There is paint on her face, where she's scrubbed at the sweat born from exertion and relentless heat, and the curls that have loosened themselves at the sides of her face swing with her movement. Stick. Are dislodged again. Swing.

Alexandrie had instructed Marceau to not allow visitors, but Leander isn't a visitor. Leander is both her second in command and she'd long ago given him the run of the studio, and thus he was given no challenge at the door.


III. Jeshavis Office (Open)

There is, just before your entrance, a gasp and then a sharp oath. An odd one; the country of origin of the phrase is Antiva, but the words start in Tevene. It doesn't translate well.

Inside, the Lady Alexandrie persists in her dogged determination to look at least moderately finished. The result is a woman even paler than usual and quite obviously due to what one might argue is the over-application of cosmetics rather than the infinite care she takes to stay shielded from the sun. The amount of powder required to stop herself from melting is frankly absurd. Despite the care she's taken, and the unceasing movement of the fan wielded with as much ferocity as any weapon, the sweat is slowly beginning its march again on the sides of her face.

The source of the oath: the condensation from the glass on her desk, unchecked, has made it into the base of her stack of papers and has begun to lift the ink.

"Qu'Est-ce que c'est," she says, sharp and irritable. A pause. And then, without looking up from where she's trying to blot the water from the page, "What."


IV. Wildcard!

Comments

[keenly]

The bottle is quickly snatched up by Colin before Lexie can take it, and he sniffs to determine what it is. His nose wrinkles and, heedless of the mess, he kneels beside her and takes her other hand.

“Hello, Lexie. How much of this have you had to drink already?”

[coquettish_trees]

The hand, being her paintbrush at the moment, is snatched back jealously with perhaps more force than she'd intended to use, nearly overbalancing herself.

"What business of it is yours what I drink from my own cellars?"

All available evidence says 'plenty.'

[keenly]

“My business,” Colin says gently, setting the bottle out of reach, “is to make you feel better. And this clearly isn’t doing that.”

His gaze switches to the painting they’re kneeling on.

“Do you want to talk about him, or do you want me to paint with you?”

[coquettish_trees]

"Non." It leaps from her, sharp and hard. One answer for both. But she keeps talking.

"It is mine. This is mine. This is what is mine."

It's not anything yet, just a broad swath of curl after curl of dark blue-black beaten into canvas.

"What is it to me that he lied. I lied. We are people who lie."

Colin hadn't rubbed all the paint from her hand when he'd taken it. She spreads her right hand on the canvas as a brace. Leaves another mark.

"And I am happy."

[keenly]

Smeared with paint as he is, he decides these will be his painting-clothes and settles down where he is, leaning to touch his head to hers.

“But?”

The news is, of course, astonishing. Colin’s still only eighty percent sure it’s actually happening, Byerly Rutyer suddenly marrying a younger woman. But his surprise isn’t for now. It’s Lexie’s emotions that need processing.

iii.

[justashotaway]

It takes more than that to put Laura off. She's a small, dark shape in the doorway, watching the woman rearranging the papers on her desk; if being snapped at has any effect on her, it doesn't show in her face or stance.

"Je viens de la part de nos associés mutuels," she answers. Her Orlesian's solid, though there's still some Nevarra in the way she forms the vowels.

[coquettish_trees]

The combination of having her own language returned to her, the audible possibility that it had been learned as a second language, perhaps a third, the words themselves—especially in light of her recent unexpected wedding guests—makes Alexandrie looks up sharply from her task. Her head tilts slightly: the graceful dip of a lady’s curious acknowledgement accompanied by more than a sliver of hawk.

“To whom do I owe the pleasure of our meeting?” This, in careful Nevarran.

[justashotaway]

"Byerly Rutyer," she says, turning over the way the woman asks the question. Orlesian vowels, Orlesian Rs, but the grammar is not wrong. This is a thing the woman's studied.

Laura doesn't volunteer anything else for the moment, standing there at the threshold of the small room with her arms at her sides, one hand curled up in the cheap black fabric of her tunic. She feels like one more shadow in the candlelight, nothing like the sweet-smelling woman trying to pretend she doesn't sweat.

[coquettish_trees]

Byerly Rutyer. Of course Byerly Rutyer. Of course he sends someone to come and say his name to her now, a droll little tap on the hilt of the knife buried in her. Alexandrie’s eyes darken, nostrils flaring ever so slightly as she breathes in.

But this girl, her dark seriousness, the slight nervous energy betrayed by the hand curled in her tunic... she reminds Alexandrie enough of Kitty to lower her hackles. A young woman whom circumstance has already made wary. Touched by the necessities of survival, likely by violence. The war. So Alexandrie is more gentle—for Kitty’s sake—when she asks “And what is it that Byerly Rutyer recommends me to you for?”

[sarcophage]

Not a visitor, not a resident—familiar all the same, and happy to remain unclassified. Rather than becoming more unruly over time, as others might have done knowing they'd be allowed to get away with it, Leander has taken to treating the staff with greater respect, especially since the respite. On this day, in this stormy occasion, he thanks patient Marceau with a passing nod—

—and soon slips into the studio, in his quiet way, and closes the door, cushioning its rest with both hands.

There he stands for a time, not in hesitance, but mindfulness. Bearing witness to her expression. Breathing the energy of the room. Only when the ripple of his arrival has settled does he leave his place by the door, and come nearer to her, softly.

[coquettish_trees]

If she notices, she gives no sign of it. Alexandrie works on the rooftops, adding fists of lighter hue where the light of the curled slam of the moon would frost them. Everything is separate and crude this close, the lights and darks unblended by anything but the eye. It requires distance to be anything like lovely. Here next to the canvas it is anger. Sorrow. Futility.

It is perhaps most evident because that is what the artist herself looks like, beating her hand against the covered unyielding floor with a set jaw and a storm in the sky of her eyes.

[sarcophage]

Time passes, then, while Leander stands alongside the work in progress. His attention moves from canvas to hands, to the woman who wields them, and back again. Companionable silence, save the swipes she deals, each of them the thump of a heart in distress. Turning herself inside out and smearing the viscera into a likeness of unrest. The tension of the room. The tangle of the woman who commands it. It's all very beautiful.

The shape of him changes in her peripheral vision—if she sees him at all—as he turns. Footfalls carry him to somewhere close by, to sit, and to cradle his jaw in his palm, and to witness quietly her immersion until she chooses to rise for a breath.

[coquettish_trees]

Time passes into meditative cadence; the light crawls slowly across the floor. Eventually Alexandrie sits up, air escaping quietly through her nose, and she holds her hand out. Presumably it's for the linen folded in between them, damp and scented with rosewater.

She doesn't need the help, it's well within her reach, but she makes the gesture all the same.

jeshavis

[wythersake]

"Congratulations," He repeats, fishing out handkerchief in offer. "I heard there were assassins."

He'd thought about attending the wedding. It would have been a better show of gratitude, perhaps. Feels vindicated now to have let it pass.

[coquettish_trees]

The offer is readily taken.

“The two of us together engaged in an entirely unsympathetic activity did indeed inspire a few men and women to reach into their purses for purposes other than supplementing my dowry,” Alexandrie replies dryly, continuing to dab at the papers. “Our fond hope is that other intrepid hopefuls shall also hear there were assassins.” Emphasis on were. “And that, combined with the passing of the most dramatic opportunity to lodge mortal complaint, shall prove preventative of further such attentions.” She sounds unconvinced. (When she looks up, she looks unconvinced.)

“Have we business? Or is this a social call, fulfilled by my pleased acceptance of your sincere well-wishing and your fortuitous acquisition of an original work by a now rather controversial artist.”

Alexandrie holds the now damp and “artistically inked” handkerchief up daintily to return it.

[wythersake]

"Do you know what they call uncontroversial artists?" He folds it carefully, two hands; it doesn't return to the same pocket. "Painters."

Of houses, barns, souvenir plates — the implication.

"I'll not keep you long." The way he folds into another chair would suggest otherwise. "How is your family?"

That's a little too pointed to be a social call.

[coquettish_trees]

“Embroiled, the last we heard. Lord Asgard—” her face and tone are mild as milk “—and his soldiers had taken up position west of Marnas Pell. A single House rebellion of sorts, he having his eyes always towards Par Vollen and being entirely unwilling to fall into line and commit his forces to the aims of the Venatori conquest of the South. But that was some months ago. My most recent information suggests they are no longer encamped, but if it is because they have been forced by the turn of the rest of the Magisterium and the shift in public opinion to take a skirmish approach or because something more dire has occurred...” she lifts her shoulders, spreads her hands.

“I should suggest we take an interest in the disposition and resources of our allies who are uniquely placed behind the front lines, but I think it unlikely our few resources shall be so allocated.”

Alexandrie tilts her head, a small smile ghosting her lips. “Or did you mean the Comte and Comtesse de la Fontaine.”

iii.

[cozen]

"I thought we should talk," Bastien answers in Orlesian.

The reasons have nothing to do with impending nuptials. More to do with the previous ones, the surge of assassins, the things they may have noticed about one another in the meantime. He had thought it not quite so important that it couldn't wait a while. Now, hovering in the doorway, he thinks perhaps it could wait longer.

Which is what he says, more or less, in his slightly-more-fluent Trade: "It is not important."

[coquettish_trees]

“It is,” she replies, summoning a small smile for an old friend. “You demure because I am cross.” A pause, and then continues with the sort of wry self-awareness she would never have allowed herself in those days. “Which has ever been clever.”

Alexandrie gestures to the chair across from her desk, folding into the gesture the flicker of fingers, the bend of wrist that Emile had taught her to make when she needed clarification or further information before making any more moves.

?

And she watches.

[cozen]

Bastien answers in kind, with a shift of the jaw that could easily be a fidgety, unconscious realignment of teeth or the beginning of a crooked smile. But when there are no unconscious movements, when an arrow is ready to be loosed or a dagger to be drawn, it means yes, now, ready.

But a bard’s signals are only good for so much. He pulls the door shut on his way further into the office. His smile is muted—respectful of her mood, dampened by his own discomfort in the heat—but still pleased.

(Perhaps he should not be so pleased. Every noble daughter who knew how to spot them in a crowd was a hazard. To a job. To their lives. But it is also to be expected, and anyway, he doesn’t do that anymore.)

“How much time we have wasted,” he says, “when we might have been plotting against Byerly in plain sight.”

[coquettish_trees]

"We may start now, if you like," she replies, "and make up straight away for what has been lost." A joke. (Mostly.) Alexandrie's voice is a pleasant murmur, pitched to be muffled by the door.

"Mais non. If we did miss time, you were a careful man. I cannot recall suspecting you of hiding anything more than perhaps a dalliance with charmingly light fingered roguery." But then, she hadn't been looking all that carefully. At least, not at Bastien. Perhaps partially by design.

"You wear it well."

iii.

[hornswoggle]

In the doorway, John holds up a hand.

"Sorry," is the first thing out of his mouth, though he isn't entirely sure he's interrupting something. "I came to ask a favor."

Which he's thinking better of now that he's considered her tone. The heat is making life unbearable for a lot of people. It's forcibly reminding John of the doldrums, the long, agonizing spell the Walrus had spent becalmed, and dwelling on that for too long is unsettling. (It becomes more and more relevant to the present situation, mired in a completely different landscape without a means of forward movement.) He takes a single step forward, positioning himself decidedly inside the office but no farther.

Poised to beat a hasty retreat if this goes poorly, as it were.

[coquettish_trees]

“Have you.”

Her eyebrows arch. It’s not an encouraging response, precisely, but neither is it a dismissal. Alexandrie’s eyes flicker up to regard John in between pats of the paper.

“Personal, or professional?”

[hornswoggle]

There's a moment of hesitation. John does not initiate this lightly. But he has taken the step, so there is nothing left but to follow it through.

"Personal."

The word is weighted.

"But I'm aware I may be asking too much," John admits, moving into the room, along towards the window. "But it's a delicate matter. I assume you know of the situation in Nascere?"

[coquettish_trees]

The paper, as dry as it is like to get through her action, is set aside to continue the process in the sunbeam that insists upon crawling across her desk each day. Let the heat do some good. Alexandrie turns back to John, her hand turning palm to the ceiling: yes. Or, at least, enough.

"There has been some change, I assume, if you have been induced to seek me now," she surmises, her head tilting with carefully idle curiosity.