contact part deux

[bouchonne]

if this were modern times byerly would probably make you listen to total eclipse of the heart before you were able to leave a message

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[bouchonne]

[ Right. He wonders what to do with that. This is all - complex. Alexandrie is a maelstrom of emotions under the easiest of circumstances; more often than not, a careless word or thoughtless gesture just stirs the chaos up further.

And so he asks, tentatively: ]

Do you wish to be?

[ Does she want soft words to help her find forgiveness? Cutting insults towards the woman who's not here? ]

[coquettish_trees]

Yes.

[ Clearer this time, more solid. Even. ]

But I do not want your anger. Not on my behalf. What she did to me is mine, and— [ a shaky breath— ] there is so much in me still that would leap out to defend her.

[ Alexandrie shakes her head, and then looks down at their hands. Older hands, by a decade, somehow holding again.

She looks back up at him, at the lines of his face that time and hardship made. Remembers him younger, hanging her a swing. ]

If you are to be angry, let it be for what she did to us. To you.

[bouchonne]

I -

[ A more difficult request. His gaze turns down. He tries to regain some dignity by making it something like a joke. ]

I do not know that I would have the right to do so. I think any who cared for you likely would have preferred me dead in a ditch to courting you. And rightly so. If she desired my destruction, perhaps she was justified.

[coquettish_trees]

No.

[ He pours dangerous waters, with only her fingertips curling over the edge of the little lifeboat of a world where being guided farther into fear is something that could have been wrongdoing. Something that wasn't for her, wasn't to make her safe, that perhaps Emile had not had her best interests at heart. ]

Why.

[ A demand. ]

Why. How can it be right. How can it be right to see me incoherent with fear and make the choice to tell me it is best for me to destroy someone I love who loves me.

[ Maybe Emile had believed it best. Maybe Emile did think she was not safe. It was for safety. It was to stop Byerly from being important to her, from getting in the way, to make her stay afraid and turn that fear to cruelty that could be wielded in the Game. Emile had loved her. Emile had used her.

Alexandrie cannot hold both thoughts yet, it is too new. Broad strokes of paint without the subtleties that come with time and thought and looking again and again at the tree. It makes her head ache, her chest. Makes her pull her hand from his so she can cover her face to stop even the dim light from touching her eyes. ]

[bouchonne]

[ He doesn't know what the right thing is to say. Doesn't know the right way to go. And for all her claim that she wants to be angry, why would he ever want to stifle the love she had for someone? ]

I - because I was not marriageable. Because I had no prospects. [ Truly: ] Most took me for a fortune-hunter at best. More likely an idle lothario.

[coquettish_trees]

[ She cannot understand anything now— or, at least, nothing of society's 'why's— there is only hurt and betrayal and the memory of turning to someone she trusted for help and receiving it in the form of what was right for the Game and ruin for both her and Byerly.

No, it had been success for her.

No.

Alexandrie shakes her head behind her hands with a violence she is unaware of. ]

Do not, [ she says, reverting to Orlesian. ] Do not say it was right. Do not tell me a pretty dream and then tell me I should not crush it and then tell me she was right to.

[ Another shake of her head, smaller this time, and she lets her hands fall so she can look at him; her eyes begging for some unclear thing. ]

What do you want, Byerly. What do you want now, not in some time that is gone. I cannot do anything about the past, and it hurts to remember. I cannot make anything make sense.

[bouchonne]

I want -

[ He answers in unsteady Orlesian - unsteady only because of his emotions, for Orlesian is his mother tongue, and he speaks it perhaps more fluently even than he speaks Trade. ]

To make you happy.

[coquettish_trees]

Hold me, then.

[ With no physical anchor, time is blending for her; too much she’d pushed down or left unrecognized years ago suddenly clamours for her attention now that its resting place has been disturbed, and all of it belongs to another self, another time, another place. All of them feel real at once and none of them feel safe. ]

I want to be here, now, with you, and I cannot keep from sliding away on my own.

[bouchonne]

Sliding away?

[ His brows knit, uncertain of her meaning. Even so, though, even with his lack of understanding, he reaches out to her, wrapping his arms around her, answering her desire. This, at least, he's good at. ]

[coquettish_trees]

[ An odd kind of shudder runs through her when his arms enclose her, as if something in her body that had shaken loose falls into place and settles there. She rests her hands flat against his chest, the side of her face above them, and she takes in a long breath that drains some of the tension from her on its exhale.

It is two more such breaths before she answers. It is in Trade again, the edge of hysteria gone from her voice when she speaks. ]

I cannot tell when I am, sometimes. If my heart is feeling what belongs to the present or the past.

Sometimes when I am most afraid that you are leaving, I can feel silk velvet balled up in my hands. It is not of the moment we are in. Perhaps even the fear is not. If I do not have something of now, someone to keep me here, it is so easy to slip away to somewhere else where it is worse and bring all of what is there back with me.

[bouchonne]

[ He supposes that he understands that. He doesn't struggle with things like...knowing when he is, nothing of that sort - he is always firmly in this moment - but he does sometimes, at times, find the past to be a heavy burden. He does, at times - rather frequently, truly - look at Alexandrie and wonder if there's a greater plan to all this. If this is all just the second, more elaborate plan to destroy him utterly, or (less self-importantly) if it's all born of some Bardly calculation that has made her want to get close to a Division Head, or or or. And that's not mistrust that's fair to her. It's a ghost of the past. That's all. But Maker, the fear is powerful.

So maybe it's not really like what she's going through. Maybe it's just being self-indulgent. But it might be something similar, he thinks. ]

I'm sorry.

[ His voice is rough. ]

I - This sort of thing helps?