Hotel Auberge

"Argh!"

Anyone in the nearby room would hear the distinct sound of a fist thumping onto a table, accompanied by a growl of frustration.

"Ihram! I have a problem! Where can I get enough food, water, and setting for a outdoors dinner for two tonight!"

In his harriedness, Alecos had forgotten to do the most important thing. His clothes were impeccable, the carriage was ready, and the hour was nigh, but he had forgotten to book the table at the Forge Fire and now, there were none left. In his desperation, he had decided that he would take her for a picnic, cliche as it was, by the waterfall that cascaded down from the mountains at the edge of the Foret Woods.

Skarlet steps in and admires the room. "A lovely room, Mother."

She takes her hood down and sits by Naoki. "It's been an interesting experience traveling by water, but I am relieved to be back on solid ground."

The sister of the Queen of Gauldin had asked, quietly, to be moved from the Royal Palace -- where Odette had last been alive -- to live somewhere else, since Arianne requested that her sister be nearby. It was then that the blonde enchantress had been moved to one of the ornate and luxurious penthouses atop the Auberge.

She had kept mostly to herself, which would have been true no matter what the circumstance with her life, but people are beginning to call her the "Black Lady of Auberge" for Genevieve now almost always wore black and now seemed.... well, she seemed as if she was already a ghost, simply waiting for her mortal coil to fall away. Genevieve wore her grief like a perfume, and so for this reason, she was almost never sought out by others.

There were no complaints, of course. Who would complain about the sister of the Queen, when the King and Queen seemed to be so happy with each other? No one wanted to burst that bubble. And really, gloomy though Genevieve was, there were far more rowdy tenants of the Auberge.

It was only that... well... it seemed as if the woman was simply waiting for death. The staff had a deadpool going, wondering when it was that Genevieve would die, and how it was that she would do it, for there was no doubt in anyone's mind.

Genevieve was a step away from suicide.

She was slow coming to the door. Originally, she had had servants to attend to her that her sister had insisted on, but working for Genevieve was a rather gloomy affair, and her magic... well. It was unchecked, and it was effecting people... and things.

When she opened the door, she looked over much like a ghost, with only a shadow of her past beauty. Her skin was pale, and herblonde hair was held back from her face in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore black... always black. Her eyes were a listless blue, almost as if they had gone blind, and the overwhelming feeling of despair and mourning was about her, immediately flowing over Hansel.

She barely opened the door, and with what was opened, her thin, malnourished body filled the way.

"Yes?" She asked. Her voice was like a quiet whisper like one would expect in a graveyard.

She watched him with those dull, lifeless blue eyes. She had made him feel uncomfortable with her overwhelming grief. She supposed she should feel sorry for that. A year ago, she would have been beautiful and elegant and kind and warm. Now she was nothing. And she felt nothing but sadness.

"I am Genevieve St. James," she said, her Gauldish accent aristocratic, her voice a quiet and somber hymn. She opened the door wider, so he could see into her grey and faded domain. "Please, come in," she said almost by rote and left the door standing open.

She moved toward her sitting room area. The apartments had once been lavish and well kept, but now it seemed that everything was... drooping. Cracking. Faded. Brittle.

Hansel couldn't possibly know it, but Genevieve had once been a powerful enchantress. Her moods effected all those things around her, so once upon a time, spoons danced with napkins and the lights would twinkle and chime.

Now, it seemed as if the even the furniture had lost all sense of purpose, had lost all sense of life. It echoed in its mistress.

Genevieve took a seat, and even it creaked quietly (as if it didn't want to disturb the somber air of Genevieve's self-imposed mausoleum) under her thin weight.

"Why have you come?" Thin and hopeless as she appeared, she still seemed young, or young enough anyway. It wasn't right that she be so melancholy. But what could anyone do?

She stated right back at him, blinking every so often. A former Genevieve would have made bright conversation, would have served tea and hit chocolate with pretty cakes and treats.

There was no brightness in Genevieve's life any more.

Her gaze traveled down to the bag he put forward, a bag that was large and bulky and rattled. She knew what was in it. Her husband's armor. He had died heroically, even for the Brotherhood's standards, and so his armor and his sword had been asked to be put on display at several museums. Genevieve had been fine with it. She never did handle grief well.

And now, here it was. In a bag. On her grey living room floor. She lifted her head and turned it to look out the window near her. The pale sunlight smoothed over her flesh. It felt like it was beckoning her outside.

How easy it would be to open the window and just... fly...

"Thank you," she said quietly and somberly to Hansel, and then said nothing else. She didn't know there were papers inside. She assumed it was what all widows received from the Brotherhood.

She barely looked away from the window as Hansel went through her husbands things looking at his armor, at the pictures he had apparently had on his person when he had died. Pictures of Genevieve. Pictures of... Odette.

It was that, that caught her eye. The crumpled picture of Genevieve and Odette, both of them golden haired and almost purple eyed, one an exact copy of the other, happy and alive and cherished. Genevieve's eyes could not stray from it -- Odette had only been two, if a day, and Genevieve's hand shook slightly as she reached out and took the crumpled picture in her hand.

She could hear Hansel speaking, and acknowledged his words, acknowledged what he was trying to do and what he was trying to say, but her gaze was riveted to the picture, and her fingertips lightly ghosted over Odette's cherubic face.

And a sob fled Genevieve's lips, making her shoulders shake. She hadn't even realized that she had already begun crying, tears sliding from her grief-struck eyes and falling over her palid, hollow cheeks.

Another sob shook her and she took in a deep breath, holding it as she closed her eyes, willing herself not to fall apart in front of this boy who seemed so young and so inexperienced with grief and loss. He thought she was broken over her husband. She wasn't.

She swallowed, and when she felt like she had control, she looked at him, her eyes watery and the first glimpse of emotion from this woman since he had come inside.

"No one has asked me that before," she told him, her breath a little shaky with the control she was trying maintain. "No one has ever asked me about Florian since I moved to Isra."

She shaking stood up from her seat, a crack splintering down the wood of the arm but not falling to pieces yet. She drifted toward the window and looked outside, still holding that photograph in her hand.

"He married me because I was pregnant and had no where else to go and no one else to protect me. He knew that I was cursed, and that Odette was cursed, but he married me to protect me anyway."

Tears began to fill her eyes, and her voice began shaking again, her control failing her as the once beautiful, now wisp of a woman seemed to break down in front of the young knight.

"But he is dead, and Odette is dead, and I am still cursed..."

And the woman fell to pieces, no more strength left in her legs as she dropped to her knees and sobbed and sobbed, and everything around her seemed to get greyed and greyed, a tablecloth falling apart, chairs cracking, chandeliers shaking ominously.

The woman's grief was sharp enough to pierce into any heart near her... which is perhaps why when Genevieve needed human comfort the most, everyone -- even her sister -- stayed away.

She didn't expect him to understand, but he said the words, and she was already making a fool of herself, and he was there and listening to her and she felt so, so broken, that she just needed to get the words out.

"She's gone," she sobbed. "She's gone and she'll never come back. Florian tried to warn me that it would end in such heart break, but I thought that if I tried -- if I just tried, if I just loved, if I just worked hard -- I could help her. She could be alive and happy, but she wasn't happy. She wasn't happy--"

More wails, more crying. She could barely breathe with how hard she was crying, and the grandiose dining table further down the room groaned and then cracked right down the middle of it, barely standing, as the cut crystal vase with the dried, dead flowers also made an ear-splintering crack.

"-- She couldn't run, she couldn't play. It took too much energy, which took too much magic for me. For all the power in all the world, I couldn't keep her alive! and so much of me -- so much of me was focused on Odette, that I wasn't there to help Florian -- I wasn't there to protect him, and now they're gone -- they're both gone and it's my fault..."

She gasped, and let out a sound of a dying woman, the grief and the mourning she felt so acute that it literally pained her. She turned her face into Hansel's leg, her slim shoulders shaking with the power of her crying as the windows then splintered, and the dining room table groaned as it finally fell with a crash, the crystal shattering over the wooden floor that bowed with the heaviness of the woman's emotional pain.

"I don't know what to do... I don't know what to do..." she barely managed to choke out between her tears and her ragged breathing, a mother and a wife in pieces at Hansel's feet.

She didn't have any words left for the moment, breaking under her guilt and grief. She was vaguely aware of being caught and held in strong arms, and a piece of her seemed to respond to that. Genevieve had been alone and had been the strong one for so long -- even in her marriage, her husband was away more often than not, on campaigns and battles and patrols. Sometimes she would go, but the journey began to prove too taxing on Odette, so Genevieve had opted to stay home.

... And then one day, Florian didn't return.

Not that Hansel's embrace reminded her of Florian's, but being able to physically lean on someone stronger made her feel that she could, at least for a little while, emotionally lean on someone and not have to be strong herself. It would be totally wrong and taboo for a woman of Genevieve's age and experience to be attracted to someone of Hansel's soft years, but a hug was harmless and would do more good than not.

As he spoke and she cried, her thin arms wrapped around his neck to hold onto him a little tighter, her face turning to press into that place between his neck and his shoulder. She could still smell sweat and grime and his efforts to try and clean himself up, but that didn't matter to her. She was just thankful at this point that he'd come at all. Thankful more that he'd stayed.

"I don't know what to do without Odette," she cried into his neck and shoulder. "She was my life. She was my everything. Now that she's gone, there's nothing left." She closed her eyes tightly and the hot tears rolled from her cheeks and splashed against Hansel, her thin body trembling in his arms. "How can there be solace when all that mattered is gone?"

For all her hopeless words, however... the furniture stopped cracking.