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.

[coquettish_trees]

She's still for a moment, and then slaps the unused glass that had been set out with the wine she'd asked for, sending the crystal skittering and spinning across the floor as she surges unsteadily to her feet to give vent to her anger.

"How dare he do this to me. How dare he force me to find out with everyone else. Like everyone else."

She hadn't told Byerly, when she and Loki had made such promises. But she had thought him unaffected, then. She had not yet gone to confess herself, nor left again, nor made attempt at reconciliation. They had not been, hesitantly, uneasily, something approaching... friends.

He had said, then, that his other love affair commanded all his loyalty. Had meant, she'd thought, that the crown of Ferelden did not—could not—share. She had thought she could make herself happy with that. And then this.

"I had thought..." She's quiet now, mostly breath, settling again to her knees. "But I was wrong. And a fool."

[keenly]

Colin reaches again for her hand with a sympathetic look. He doesn’t like seeing her like this, but now isn’t the time to talk her down. She needs to get everything out first. She’s possessive, he knows that, and Byerly is a complicated issue for her. He can’t go into this guessing how she feels.

“You had thought what?”

[coquettish_trees]

"That somehow I..."

It's unforgivable. Plaintive, childish, forced through a throat too tight to allow for it.

"Meant something. Despite everything. Even if it was not... I thought at least I held a place set apart. As he—" her hand rises, trembling, to cover the faltering sound, eyes full of the wound of suddenly, unexpectedly finding oneself alone. "As he does in me."

[keenly]

Colin wraps his arm around her—the one with the hand not covered in paint.

“He’ll always love you,” he says more out of comfort than from any certainty about Byerly. “And you’ll always love him. But these conversations aren’t held easily. I don’t think it happened out of any lack of meaning, just...a desire to not have an awkward conversation. It’s still wrong, but it may be a more forgivable sin than the other. He didn’t go to you, not because you weren’t special to him, but because you were.”

And, if Colin is right, the man didn’t want to discuss his shotgun wedding with anyone who might beat on him for getting a younger woman pregnant.

[coquettish_trees]

But rather than being comforted, Alexandrie pulls away as if burned.

"Do not make such conjecture," she warns. "There is nothing kind in that reassurance, and it will little serve me to lie about in rose petals and believe it so."

[keenly]

“Lexie,” Colin sighs. She’ll always take more comfort in the worst-case scenario simply because she can believe in it more. “I’m not trying to coddle you, I’m offering what I genuinely think is the most logical explanation. And it’s not exactly rose petals. It still leaves you miserable for the next few days. It still leaves him owing you a massive explanation. And I never said I was certain.”

[coquettish_trees]

But she's been drinking, been embodying the tight terrible feeling of beating her fists against unyielding memory, and she clutches her hurt to her chest as if it is priceless to her, ready to hiss and snap and bristle at anyone who tries to take it.

But it is Colin, and so she settles.

"Let me be, cher. I do not wish explanations. I wish to be angry with him." She looks down at the canvas. At her hands, the dark mess of them. "Save this, and one time other," The steps, the bottle. She'd thrown her first punch then. "I have only ever sorrowed. I have only ever been angry with myself for what it is I wrought.

"Now he has hurt me and my anger, for a time, may burn clean."

[keenly]

Colin’s eyes widen briefly at her frankness, very nearly Fereldan in its honesty. So often he is left to guess what she needs, but now, she is telling him. And he thinks about it for a minute. She’s not a violent woman, but she might get a little more satisfaction out of this little art project if her fists had more to connect with than the floor.

“Just a minute,” he says, carefully getting to his feet and wiping them before leaving the room. When he comes back, it’s with a large flour sack the staff uses to store a lot of smaller sacks in. There being a relatively low rate of reuse for sacks in this house, it’s quite full. Colin holds it up.

“Maybe having something to punch? We could pin the canvas on. You could even pretend it’s him.”

[coquettish_trees]

It’s delightful enough in its earnest simplicity that Alexandrie actually laughs quietly as she shakes her head, stirring herself to go and kiss Colin’s cheek with the gentle affection she reserves for him.

“So thoughtful, mon chou,” she murmurs, resting her head on his shoulder. “But it is a different sort of anger, I think, than can be addressed by beating a poppet of any one man, no matter how inconsiderate. I am angry with him, yes, but...” she sighs and shifts her head, looks at the weave of Colin’s tunic, then past it to her work. “Even more, I am angry at the whole of our acquaintance. I am angry with whoever has written it to be as it is.”