open | you know you love me

[coquettish_trees]

WHO: Lexie, Gwen, Wysteria, Bastien, you
WHAT: Hot weather, hot goss
WHEN: Various, mostly now~
WHERE: Kirkwall generally
NOTES: I've put the starters in brackets but do you and I'll match!

gwenaëlle; crystal (back when this happened).

[ one afternoon, of a sudden: ]

Gigi! You shall never guess how I spent my early afternoon.

[ she sounds delighted. ]



wysteria; on the veranda at the asgard estate.

[ It being hard to properly enjoy chilled wine through a veil, Alexandrie's is currently thrown back over her hat. She needs neither covering, the veranda is perfectly shaded at this time of day, but she wears them in any case in the hope that the extra protection will induce her skin to return to its customary—and much desired—unblemished fairness.

She lifts her glass, observes the frozen strawberry gently bobbing in the straw-coloured liquid contained within it, and frowns as mightily as she can without encouraging wrinkles. ]

It is such a lovely day to sit out at a café, and I hate it.



bastien; showing up unexpectedly at his room.

[ knock knock knock knock knock~ it's exuberant, and lacks the hard edged sound of bare knuckles. Wonder who it is. ]



everyone else~

[ drop me a top level with something your character knows (of any level of import) that Alexandrie might have conceivably heard tell of or some piece of gossip about them you'd like to have reached her, and prepare yourself for the advent of a terrible busybody ]

Comments

[cozen]

[ He laughs through the harp, which is, you know. Odd. A swarm of bees saying heh heh heh. But then he extracts it from under his lips and sets it back on top of the strewn papers that had been the target of his focus before the knock. ]

My singing you have heard, of course, but if it helps to have it fresh in mind...

[ He thinks, nods, stretches his jaw, and starts into a rendition of "The Girl in Red Crossing" that is, quite on purpose, pitchy and off-key. The sort of thing he used to do to make Ines lose her temper with him for fun. ]

[coquettish_trees]

[ She will let him finish the entire rendition, wearing much the same look of devout concentration she had for the playing of the mouth harp. ]

Truly astounding! [ She claps as she might for a quartet at a salon. Then, brightly: ] I am sick of it already!

[ And gestures him onward, holding an arm across her body so she can rest her other elbow on it, allowing her to prop her chin with impish expectation on the back of her hand without anything so vulgar as leaning forward. ]

[cozen]

Merci.

[ For the praise, such as it were, and of course for sparing him a forward lean. If he’s so exposed to her bosoms again this soon after Sonia’s party, he may faint. Of rapture, etc.

As for his whining: ]

My cello! My life!

[ His accent takes on—no offense—a slightly more upperclass affectation, and he pulls the chair he’s sitting on backwards back by its back—I am sorry for that sentence—until it tips, catching himself on his desktop in what at least looks like a close call. His upper half is all defeated slump, suspended between his elbows on the desk like a scarecrow on a beam, but his legs stay tense enough to keep the chair in place. ]

Cut off from my soul. The world has no color. I would ask that a sword be run through my heart, but I feel so empty, so lifeless, I know it must already be gone.

[coquettish_trees]

[ She begins as she had with the others: deep and serious scrutiny. But for this—

It changes. Scrutiny turns to sympathy, sympathy to sorrow, and once he has finished bemoaning his loss sorrow manages—with a soft despairing cry and a hand genteelly held to cover it—to shed a single tear when she closes her eyes and turns her face away.

In the correct direction to show off the tear rather than hide it, naturally.

After a shared moment of terrible bereavement, she blots her face with a finger and mimes flicking the moisture at him (it’s in her glove of course, but it’s the thought that counts,) all smiles again. ]

Ah, monsieur, all nature cannot but weep with you! I have decided you have indeed been given the mouth-harp to cease your whining. Not because it is insufferable, but [ her hand placed to her breast, ] to save all hearts in the Gallows from breaking.

[cozen]

[ His smile starts small, at her cry, and stretches wide into a grin at the summoned tear, and stays wide. ]

I will choose to believe it. —and brava, Madame.

[ A single tear, and so quickly! Quite a feat.

He pushes his elbows together to hoist himself back up and forwards until the chair is back on all four of its legs. ]

Ah— [ a shoulder roll ] —I will feel that later. [ He probably really will, at least a little, even if he's in somewhat better shape these days than he claims. ] You are lucky you will never grow old. It is...

[ He thinks, face pensive, as if trying to find the proper metaphor or literary allusion to best convey the mundane horror of the body's slow betrayal of itself, the narrowing of possibilities, the crystallization of faults and failings that once seemed surmountable. ]

... a bitch.

[coquettish_trees]

[ It is a fine trick, to be sure, although it is harder sometimes to put away the particular thorns she grasps to manage it. A light sniff clears up the remainder, and she offers him a seated curtsey with a lift of the skirts at her sides and a demure bob of her head. ]

I shall cherish forever that you made your muscles complain behalf of my amusement. [ A brief lift of her eyebrow, ] And as I do not age that means, indeed, forever.

[ sigh~ ]

I shall miss you, when I am still as lovely and bright as a dew-kissed rose and you and Byerly are gone.

[ Her turn to sit improprietously, drawing her feet up so she can clasp her hands around her knees and rest her cheek upon one. ]

What shall I say of you, when everything is stories? What should you like to be?

[cozen]

[ Bastien hums a melodic hum while he thinks, skimming past the hopes and fears and uncertainties that would feel like tossing pieces of his insides onto the floor between them, soft and bloody, and past the place where I want to have been great still wrestles with I want to have been good, to land on— ]

I would like to be taller. Not as tall as Byerly. He can have the height, since I have all the happiness. But, ah—

[ He holds up two flat hands with an approximation of five inches between them, raises one until it’s only two. ]

Taller. And a little thinner in the face. Tell the people that I could eat cake without my jaw disappearing overnight. A whole cake. A big one.

[coquettish_trees]

Mais oui! I shall tell the tale, but only ever late in the evening when the fire burns low, of the day you ate [ whispered, for emphasis: ] two.

The first you cut with a knife, but the second... the second sliced with the definition of your jaw.

When children ask me “Truly? Did he truly?” I shall but smile so knowingly that the next day will find them begging their mothers to make cakes so they might smash their chins into them, comparing to see who might have done it so well as Bastien.

[cozen]

[ He laughs—a real laugh, unvarnished, without any attempts to keep his nose and eyes from wrinkling or his teeth (larger than one might expect, if short of remarkable in size) from being on full display. ]

What a comfort, to have my legacy in such capable hands. I’ll go to my pyre in peace.

[ Arms folded on the back of his chair, he uses one hand to hold his head up. ]

Unless I must go knowing you are left alone in your eternal youth. Will your husband be young forever, too? If there was ever a time for forbidden Tevinter magic—

[coquettish_trees]

Let us say yes, for the purposes of our respective peace and happiness. As all else lives and dies, I shall be forever lovely and forever loved.

[ a soft hum of thought, her head switching its lean to her other knee to match the side he props his own on. ]

As Byerly has been so generous with his height, shall we let him have a bit of your happiness in these stories?

[ She copies his earlier gesture; hands held five inches apart, one rising until it is only two. ]

Or shall you maintain it all and gallantly let him lean upon it sometimes. We cannot have too much forgotten, or it shall no longer be his memory I carry, and I shall lose him when I have lived so long and spoken them so long that my stories are my truths as well.

[ It is so placidly non-committal that he will know her for no such thing. Raw things on the floor indeed. ]

[cozen]

Perhaps you could split him in two, for your stories. Handsome brothers.

[ His face has barely changed, smile lazy and warm, but there’s something more attentive in his eyes. Not like a predator contemplating pursuit. More like a man carrying something fragile, minding his steps. ]

Give to one all the happiness he would have if it were our choice, and to the other all the happiness he would have if it were his. Then if you begin to lose the truth, in a thousand years, you can look for it between them.

[ He angles his head, brightens, and offers a metaphorical hand up out of melancholy: ]

But they will have to have new names, so neither is more Byerly than the other.

[coquettish_trees]

[ She does not want to be something that needs to be looked at that way. Something that has a place in it that is brittle, that broke once and kept breaking. That has that place in it known.

For some reason, the kindness makes it worse, but she takes the offered hand in any case. ]

Ah, but I think rather than neither they ought both be named Byerly, as then I might call them ‘By and By’. It is simple enough to tell them apart: one can grow only a mustache, and one only a beard.

[cozen]

[ Bastien laughs again, more quietly this time, and dips his propped-up head to the side in consideration. ]

Byron and By…man, [ he proposes, with an apologetic wince on the last syllable. It sounds Fereldan, at least, to his ears. ] Mustache and beard, respectively.

[coquettish_trees]

Do names matter, do you think? Would it be unfair to his memory to one day be the only creature on earth who keeps it?

[ She cannot do this; cannot talk of him even in jest without taking every road that turns toward the brittle place in her like a lodestone wishing for north.

She is glad Athessa told her. She is not glad. She smiles and tilts her head further into her knee. ]

Perhaps we should also change your name, for fairness sake, and you shall both be my secrets. Have you one you would like?

[cozen]

[ At the shift, his careless smile takes less invisible effort—his earlier care wasn’t all for her and her heart. Only mostly. ]

If I am tall and sharp-jawed...

[ He doesn’t need to think about the question half as long as he does, which isn’t very long anyway. ]

Léon.

[ A private joke. He told Vincent once, in a bid to be a mystery worth his attention: It isn’t my real name. Then, pressed for the truth, he balked and feinted. Now there is a little Léona in Val Firmin, five years old and fatherless and named for a lie—

It isn’t a very funny joke. ]

You will have to change yours, as well, if you do not want to join the Witch of the Wilds in fearsome legend.

[coquettish_trees]

Perhaps eventually I should like to be a fearsome legend!

Until then, I have a few to use already. Once I have worn a small hole in Alexandrie, I shall be Lucette. Then Seraphine, then Arienne. Perhaps when I miss my name for a time I shall be Antivan and be Alessandra; and in the years when I am envious that I am not in the stories, I shall be Invidia in Tevinter.

[ For while it sounds lovely enough, that is what it means; envy. ]

Then I shall borrow the names of everyone I love that has gone and live lives I think they might have liked to. And then, afterwards, [ pause for effect, ] I shall be fearsome.

[ She wrinkles her nose slightly and makes a ‘roar’ face. ]