open | love in the time of grippe

[coquettish_trees]

WHO: Alexandrie Nightingale and anyone who wants to be cosseted
WHAT: She's here to visit you, illness-ridden friends.
WHEN: Grippe Season
WHERE: Quarantine Central (and also at home because someone's dodging being dragged in there.)
NOTES: will match prose or brackets ♥

It's absolutely wretched here, but Alexandrie is making rounds of the sickbeds anyway dressed in simple expendable skirts (she's not burning anything nice thankyouverymuch), her hair woven into a casual halo of braids. For whatever reason—Maferath's own luck, perhaps—despite her visits to help care for those affected by the outbreak, she hasn't taken ill herself and doesn't look like to.

And so here she is, murmuring some sort of sympathetic nothing, resting the back of her bare hand on a forehead or a cheek and replacing the towels that help to lower fever with cooler ones.

Comments

[sarcophage]

The replacement is met with a sigh, half relief, half frustration. Of the sheen, he grumbles, "Like spring dew on a lily."

Will it annoy her if he sits up? He's doing it either way, with a hand clasped over his own forehead so her work doesn't go tumbling down his nose and into his lap. With a stiffness he's determined not to feel, and an agility comparable to that of the recently departed King Markus, he rearranges himself—one foot over the cot's edge, then the other—

"This is tedious. I'm getting up."

[coquettish_trees]

"Are you." Incredulous, but gentle. She'll attempt to stop him, redirect him back to his previously prone position with a press against his shoulder. If he is strong enough to resist her, then she'll offer an arm instead. A short shuffling walk outside, a little fresh air off the sea rather than the stagnant weighty atmosphere of the warehouse might do him well.

If he is not, well then, he belongs in bed.

[sarcophage]

It's more persistence than strength that keeps him upright versus so heartless a refusal to let him do what he likes. Clammy fingers prying beneath her palm, grasping her forearm, pushing in return.

"I'm not a child," he croaks. "If I can get up to use the privy," which he can, looking like an old man wearing a young man's skin, "I can get up for any other reason. Thank you very much for your concern—" going on with coughs instead of words, each ending in a high wheeze.

(Note that even as he leaves the cot, he has yet to release her arm.)

At length, scowling: "It's a cruelty to confine me to bed for so long. My bones are pressing through my skin." They aren't.

[coquettish_trees]

“Pauvre cher,” Alexandrie mourns for him, pressing his hand gently where it holds her arm. She’ll walk him slowly through the room and out to the fresh air with little for conversation besides intermittent wordless murmurs of encouragement when his condition requires a rest, causes a stumble or pause.

It’s ponderous and halting, but eventually: the sea.

“Do say if it becomes too chilly.”

[sarcophage]

"It's already too chilly."

He's dressed in bedclothes, slippers, fortunately had the presence of mind to drag with him one of the blankets—and they're in full maritime winter. Given his present state, no amount of clothing would be sufficient. Something to look at other than wall or ceiling or makeshift curtain or his own legs and feet beneath the blanket, something to smell other than the sweat and the uniquely unpleasant excrement of the unwell: worth it.

Averesch's sentinel wisp follows them at a delay, hurrying to catch up.

"Sister Sara is going to wring your neck for this."

[coquettish_trees]

"Sister Sara cannot reach it," Alexandrie replies pertly, although she does reach with her free hand to pull the blanket a little more snugly around Leander's shoulders.

"And as a Sister, she ought to know well enough that there are parts of us not our bodies that must be treated." She looks out over the sea, its winter waves, the ice that floats closer to the coast making the closer swells ripple and shine like the scales of a great dragon. The air is sharp and cold and clean and perhaps working its fingers balefully into Leander's nose and chest but they will not stay long.

"Are we, as artists, not renewed by beauty that brings with it some suffering?"

[sarcophage]

The jab at Sister Sara's height, the way it's delivered, clutches in his belly—doesn't make it out as a laugh, but nonetheless appears as a mild shift in expression. Still gamely tagging along, he grasps the blanket to keep it where Alexandrie decides it should be. Colour rising weakly to his cheeks, his ears, to meet the cold, too blotchy for the proper illusion of health. (The beds of his nails are leaning purple. Lips, too, through their pallor.)

"So long as one remains in balance with the other, perhaps. However we might measure that."

[coquettish_trees]

"Balance hardly stays still long enough to wait for measure," she replies idly, picking one wave to watch. Another, after it crashes. The lone cloud flying swiftly across the sky. Back to Leander, then, to take an inventory of his seeming. (The nails are not unnoticed. Lips, too. One more moment, and she'll encourage him back inside to bed.)

[sarcophage]

"No, it doesn't."

Quiet, for a moment, breathing with a conscious steadiness. The wind moves his hair. "I wish it would. Or that I could take the scale in my hands, and... wrench it into some state that better suits me," he coughs twice, clears his throat. Doesn't spit, for the Lady's benefit, though he wants to. "Some deformation. At least then it would be mine."