faderift | closed | all work and no play

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.

"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."

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?"

"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."

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."

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."

“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?”

Edited 2019-12-10 17:52 (UTC)

"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."

“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.”

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."

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

“Our business, or your own?”

"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.

“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?”

"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."

Her eyebrows raise in a curious surprise.

“Did you?” she asks, then muses after a pause, “I have not sat for anyone in some time.

“What is it that should make such a request inappropriate?” Surely he knows enough about the Orlesian peerage by now to know there is little deemed that. The curiosity, consequently, increases.

"The concept, more than the circumstance... although, that too, I suppose. No doubt you've heard the rumours." His flat effect belies any genuine concern. (There is none to hide.) "Really, you've seen some of my work, but not all of it. Producing what inspires me most will draw attention of the kind no mage should wish to bear, so I must either swallow it back, or destroy it once it's been given shape."

A necessity, evolved; now it's only a benefit of the ritual.

"What I had in mind for you—many would call it blasphemous."

Edited 2019-12-16 03:36 (UTC)

“Am I to be destroyed once given shape?” she inquires from her recline—rather insouciantly, all things considered. “I should prefer not to be.”

The silence before he answers may be considered uncomfortably long. To another kind of person, perhaps. And then there's the smoke to blame, the soft and agreeable substrate—

"No."

She twists her hand, a turn from back to palm: well then.

"Will you tell me, or must I agree to it first?"

Alexandrie may observe the minute movements of greyish eyes, little ticks here and there, indicative of the mechanisms of thought turning behind them. At length, Leander sighs. Folds his hands across his torso. Spreads his toes, rolls his ankles, lets his feet splay again among the cushions. His smile reappears, brief as a curl of smoke, softer than the cinder beneath it.

"I'll have to consider it," he says, and turns his head to study Alexandrie a while. "And I've decided to pretend you really are foolish enough to agree to anything, sight unseen, even though it's more likely you only said that because you knew I'd like to hear it."

“Alas, I have ruined my reputation.” She doesn’t sound overbothered, having indeed said it for that very reason.

“But I do admit curiosity.” Blasphemy. “Am I to be Andraste?” She smiles, a half-moon of secret mirth, effecting her own sinuous stretch. “Bellitanus?”

Naturally, the feline undulation of her body draws his eye, and tugs his mouth a bit crooked in the process. Across the meagre gap between the two of them, he reaches, takes one end of her robe belt between his first two fingers and tosses it back across her body, politely playful. Warming back up after his spell of fussing.

"Would you like to be Andraste?"

She chuckles lowly at the flip of the tie and then hums her consideration, running the fabric through her fingers before tsking her dismissal of the idea. “While I have sung to please him, I prefer my husband present.”

It would be an innocent enough sentiment, were it not for the warm drawl of the words.

After a moment of genuine surprise, betrayed by the angle of his eyebrows, Leander slips smoothly into an answering purr: "What a pretty picture that would make." He's not so foolish to go staggering after a bit of suggestion, even if present circumstances are—as they are. Warm and soft. Close enough to touch. "I hadn't thought to render the two of you together."

That sparks several layers of interest, and Alexandrie rolls herself half toward Leander so she can face him properly and props her head up on her hand.

"Should it become even more blasphemous through his addition?"

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