closed | all work and no play

[coquettish_trees]

WHO: Lady Alexandrie and her Lounge Brigade
WHAT: Irreverence and indolence for the sake of morale
WHEN: Now
WHERE: The Unofficial Tevinter Embassy (i.e. the Asgard estate in Hightown), and other places around Kirkwall
NOTES: Catch-all for closed starters; pm/plurk/discord/smoke signal me if you want to plan something. ♥

The undead walk the land, there's mountains of work to be done, ten tasks for every hand, so...

Champagne, anyone?

Comments

[sarcophage]

"The first two, of course. If I'm to be a mummy I must be well attended. Although, wouldn't it be lovely to send letters to people you know? From the crypt, by your own waxy, bony hand. Imagine the shock."

Let not thy sorrow die, though I am dead, and other gentle aspirations. That alone would be a good reason to keep friends.

The angle of her attention, meanwhile, does not go unnoticed, and his commentary comes in the form of a long look and a thin smile that lingers until he takes the hookah's nozzle gently between his teeth. His tongue comes forward to touch it. His eyebrow moves expectantly.

[coquettish_trees]

“It heals very well,” she remarks, finishing her unhurried inspection and returning her eyes to his, “for a wound that wanted stitches and had none.”

“Did you tend to it later, then?” With a loving care, perhaps, as one might polish a locket. Oil its hinges, run gentle fingers over its engravings, look upon what it contains—or not. Although the tone is conversational, beginning to become languid with what the smoke carries, Alexandrie makes little effort to hide the smaller signs of her curiosity. Leander will see them. Requite or ignore them as he likes.

[sarcophage]

As he likes.

The line down his chest has never wanted stitches, and even if it had, hers would not be the hand meant to tie them. All the same, his answer is a nod, the momentary lowering of his eyelids; they reopen heavy with contentment. (Could still snap keen in an instant.) He rests the hose on his flat belly, still clasping it lightly.

"You left it alone even after I'd fainted. I never thanked you for that."

[coquettish_trees]

“I am fonder of the meanings of things than I am of proper surgery,” she replies, lifting a shoulder. “You need not tell—” a breath to say something, then a brief snag in her speech, an equally brief flicker of her gaze upward in something approaching irritation, “—Madame Rutyer.”

[sarcophage]

Her discomfort snags him, too—at the corner of his mouth, by the look of it. Although it isn't exactly a smile.

"I would never." He might. Probably won't. "Besides, we haven't spoken much since that preposterous wedding of theirs." Since she didn't tender his invitation personally and he decided to be disproportionately annoyed by that.

[coquettish_trees]

"And yet, I imagine it generally thought less absurd than my own." Alexandrie exhales dry amusement through her nose in a thin stream of smoke.

"Did you speak with her much before?"

[sarcophage]

"Oh, yes. I spent a good deal of my free time in the infirmary, often to watch her work. I even named her Kitten. And still I found out about their hasty engagement by way of a rock, the same as everyone else—it was dreadfully impersonal. Insulting, really. What's the point of having friends at all?"

He may be fluffing up the drama for Lexie's benefit.

"Besides, Tevinter or no, your husband is worthy of the position."

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie smiles for that and reclines into the pile of pillows behind her, catlike in both. Her hose uncoils to follow her, and she lets it drape serpentine over her chest much the same as Loki sometimes does when he is inclined to have scales.

"A rare, and appreciated, notion," she drawls, affecting a small salute with the nozzle in her hand. "As to the nearly immediately subsequent wedding, I confess myself to have been similarly irritated by the method of invitation." She may be downplaying the drama for Byerly's benefit, although the sigh which follows is immensely overblown to make up for it. "How fragile friendships are." She inspects her nails, for punctuation, "I did not attend, but I hear there was recompense delivered in the form of a dagger," she looks back up with carefully idle amusement. "Twice! Unless you took a different umbrage with him."

[sarcophage]

He cuts a gaze sideways, immediate—and a touch surprised, but pleasantly so. Is the man whispering about it now, apropos of nothing obvious, rather than saving it for a rainy day? Interesting.

His sigh is markedly less theatrical, and without smoke, the hose still resting beneath his hand.

"No, that was well before the wedding. When everyone who mattered was dead."

[coquettish_trees]

"Fragile friendships indeed." Having been alive at the time, she reaches behind her to toss a small pillow at him in mock affront. Everyone who mattered; that neatly narrows down the list of those who might have been responsible for that scar.

[sarcophage]

After enduring the serious emotional and physical injury of his brutal attack (read: scrunching up his face and remaining otherwise immobile), Leander befriends the projectile pillow by tucking it under his arm, something like a teddy bear.

"You know what I meant; nothing matters more to the freshly and suddenly bereaved than the ones who've left them behind. Had your lord been truly gone, you'd have traded me for him without the slightest conflict, and I take no offence to that. It's beautiful, I think—the purity of it. How powerful an emotion can be."

In other people, anyway. He'd excise it from himself altogether if he could.

[coquettish_trees]

A shoulder lifted in acknowledgement, an apologetic smile that contains no apology: she would have.

"A dangerous thing for mages, no?" She draws thoughtfully on the mouthpiece, tilts her head back to release the smoke into the air, and then abandons the hose to the side. Enough for now; let it settle in. "Ah, but dangerous things are so often beautiful." You. Me. My husband. Whomever likely once tried to kill you.

[sarcophage]

"Mm. Not so many people will seek out a dangerous thing for its beauty. But to be drawn in by a beautiful thing, unaware..." Gliding on a tide of smoke, and truly unaccustomed to the feeling—though he hasn't admitted as much to Alexandrie—Leander stirs himself alert with a sudden deep breath, and a sharper sigh, bracing against it. If his thoughts become so loose as to slip from sedate to dangerous, he'll simply depart.

"Well. I don't need to explain it to you... but perhaps someone should explain it to Byerly." The nozzle, and the hose attached, he finally sets aside. "I suppose he made himself the victim in his telling."

[coquettish_trees]

It had taken nearly a full hour for Emile to help arrange her; to choose a book, the page, the fall of her hair, the light and shadow on the curve and angle of her, the practice of her turn. Her look, her smile, her words, their tone. If he had learned it nowhere else, Byerly knows.

Although she hadn't been truly dangerous until the end.

Alexandrie lifts an eyebrow. "Have you a different story?"

[sarcophage]

"Only that in the throes of his own grief, he attacked me for attending to mine." The distinction between physical and verbal attacks is not one Leander cares to make in this particular case. "I gave him plenty of opportunity to leave it alone, but he wouldn't. So I stuck him," pressing a finger into the meat just above his own pelvic crest, "just there, nowhere vital, and not very deep. He wasn't expecting it. Wouldn't even let me heal it, I suppose out of stubbornness, or fear." That thing people feel sometimes, I guess.

He turns toward Alexandrie suddenly, eyebrows raised— "Did he tell you he spat on me? Because he did." Settling again, "I wrote him a very nice note, afterward, which he made light of, and in the meantime he'd forged a copy of it, which he later shared with me. He'd added a few words to the text, meant to incriminate. But why would I inform him of what I'd done in a letter addressed to him? That's stupid. And it completely destroyed the rhythm, besides. I thought he might appreciate the poetic language," he sniffs, "but perhaps that was only a pretense he wore when he thought he might want to fuck me."

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie rolls the story over in her mind, fingers the strings hanging off it more for the feel than any intention to pick it apart and examine it. The pillows are too soft, and she's enjoying her comfortable idleness. Even so, she thinks, and decides it more likely that Byerly—in the throes of his own grief—had discovered a sharp thing and goaded it to its violence in the same bleak dark self-destruction he so often entertains.

She frowns, wonders suddenly if he is always grieving.

Then re-casts the concern of it to be for her companion, the frustrated poet. "How entirely uncouth of him. Although I suppose through it I have him to thank for the illumination that you write as well as paint." Alexandrie affects a pout, summarily discarding the subject of both Rutyers. "How dare you keep this from me."

[sarcophage]

Were he not now occupied with scrolling backwards through his own mental transcript in search of anything he shouldn't have said (a less-than-ideal sequence of actions) and feeling rather floaty-sinky-dreamy besides (he won't be drawing from this manner of pipe again, unless very specific company proposes it), Leander might be more irritated with the sudden turn away from his complaint.

Subdued, murmuring, "I don't count it among my skills. He suggested it early on."

[coquettish_trees]

“Did he? I had no idea you had kept his company!” Never mind, they’re back. It is hard to keep her floating curiosity at bay, but Alexandrie—being far more used to the feeling—is confident in her ability to keep the important pieces of her former lover in her pockets. Let Byerly be an irreverent scoundrel; it is how he wants it, after all. “I surmise far less so, now.”

She drapes an arm across her eyes, and then removes it almost immediately to raise her eyebrows at Leander. “The very nice note was not an apology was it?”

[sarcophage]

"It was." It wasn't technically. "Well, something like it. I acknowledged both our compromised judgment, which should be enough for anyone." Apologetic words are themselves meaningless, in his opinion. "And I had not kept his company. You make it sound as if we were friends, but he hardly spoke to me except through the stones. We'd begun a nice little dance, I thought, and he had to ruin it by being a coward."

The shadow building at his brow has settled into a scowl of sullenness, and an overall listlessness of the body, deceptively common but rare in nearly anyone's company—still, it will seem fitting for the frustration of a spoiled game for one inclined to care about such things.

"And now he's head of Diplomacy. Between that and the rest of the foolishness in this place," and the constant squeeze behind that scar on his breastbone, "I've been thinking of resigning."

[coquettish_trees]

“You would leave me alone with—” Alexandrie pauses to draw whatever paper is on top of the stack on the rug to her with a daintily pointed toe, searching it out with her fingers afterwards and eyeing it, “—Lord Berard, and his—“ she scans the page briefly, “—assertions that the Venatori have taken over Nevarra in its entirety, and as he risks everything to tell us so—“ continued scanning, and her mouth twitches, “—surely we can see our way to supporting his bid to succeed his father over his sister—” she releases the letter into the air, letting it float its way back to the rug, “—who is almost certainly at the very least a Venatori sympathizer? I shall perish.”

A moment, and then, “Truly though, it is so often a foolish disorganization, and we need to keep our sharper minds where they have some ability to oversee it, so while entirely understandable—please do not.”

[sarcophage]

Things Leander thinks, resentfully, but does not say: his sharp mind could be equally fulfilled working for Corypheus—which is to say, hardly at all. They might appreciate his full skillset, at least, but if he wanted to live in Tevinter, he'd have gone there by now.

"Lord Berard and his entire family can perish for all I care. But Maker forbid you should be inconvenienced." Wry, but not quite cutting. He sighs directly after, in clear concession, then abruptly dismisses the hose from his personal space, letting it fall wherever it will. "How embarrassing. I'm never doing this again." Anyway, "I'll stay, but may be gone in the coming months, regardless."

[coquettish_trees]

She presses a hand to her heart with lax fluidity—Maker forbid—and then leaves it there.

“Our business, or your own?”

[sarcophage]

"Mine." Spoken with a finality inhospitable to further questions. "In the meantime I'll be keeping the possibility in mind, so... should it come to pass, my work won't be left in complete disarray."

Not that it matters—not that much of anything will matter, then—but he ought to leave a decent reputation behind. Such things have a way of intertwining with future paths, for good or ill, in ways one cannot expect.

[coquettish_trees]

“Entirely appreciated.”

She sits for a while, eyeing the fabric draped on the ceiling, and then queries absently, “May I keep some of your work, should you indeed go about your business?”

[sarcophage]

"You'll be keeping all of it." His frown abates momentarily, but only just. "Unless you mean the other kind?" Probably she does. She must also be aware that he consigns his work to flame as a habit, sketch and sculpture alike; her own hearth has held its fair share of sacrificial ashes.

A thoughtful silence.

"I did always mean to ask if you'd sit for me. I had—have—something specific in mind to that effect. But it seemed inappropriate."