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

[cozen]

She might as well compliment him for the way he wears his skin—but he would accept that, too, with as pleased a smile.

“They must start the urchins young,” he says. He was older than many of the orphans and cast-offs taken under bardmasters’ conditional wings, maybe too old to qualify as an urchin at that point no matter how drowned he was in grown men’s hand-me-downs, and never qualified as an orphan at all—but those secrets he keeps, not like cards up his sleeves but like caches buried in a forest and all but forgotten. Anyway: they must start the urchins young, “since the nobles begin at birth.”

[coquettish_trees]

"Ah— a late-blooming rose, I."

Or she wouldn't have been caught, snipped, worn briefly as Rolant de Ezoire's boutonniere, and discarded for the next fresh flower. If she had been graced with less kind parents, perhaps, she might have started as young. Not been, along with Evie, the youngest precious pets of all the household. If she hadn't turned eagerly towards the romantic ladies of the high ballads while her twin beamed for the chevaliers. If—

Such foolish familiar thoughts, these. It is done, all of it done, and now they are here.

"I endeavored to make up for it." Her smile is, briefly, tired.

[cozen]

He shakes his head, a minute gesture, substitute for what he might say—I have always preferred the buds, which is true, or an expounding on the way a noble's children hold their shoulders and angle their chins at five or six when everyone else is learning to tuck inward to avoid trouble with their betters, the habits and gestures and pronunciations and colloquialisms that must be excised and replaced before any gamin is fit for a ballroom—if he were not so disinterested in being trite or in revisiting those years.

"I am sure you have," he says instead, moving to sit with his usual artless aplomb, "and I would like to hear about it. Or would you prefer to tell me why you are cross? If you say it is only the heat—" A pause, thoughtful and damp. "—I will believe you."

[coquettish_trees]

"You know why I am cross," she says, the the gentlest of scolds.

It wouldn't be difficult for one who had shared that particular time with her to figure out, bard or not. Add what could be gathered from listening to the patterns of conversation on the crystals, the conspicuous absence of her airy irreverence on one recent betrothal announcement, and a guess might be hazarded by anyone paying the slightest attention.

But Alexandrie doesn't feel like pulling open the angry edges of it. Not in her office, where she is meant to be in control. Not to someone whose brilliantly fine-tuned sympathy will so easily tease out the whole of it once begun. And so she folds her fingers together, the fabric of the gloves she stubbornly wears despite the sweat and heat they trap whispering against each other, acknowledging one thing with her body and saying another.

"It is the heat."

[cozen]

“It is monstrous,” he says, agreeably sympathetic.

He has pieces of the problem, of course, gathered in his hands, but he doesn’t quite know how to fit them together. Byerly is married; Alexandrie was married first.

But he’s not going to press. Even when he was a boy with a lute in the streets of Val Royeaux, he learned he did better acting as if he was happy to play with or without an audience and their coin than to make a pest of himself badgering passersby for attention.

“If you walk the walls, the wind can help, but I am afraid it would not agree with your papers.”