graveyard (eheheh) // paint me // defend // sky // » // solace
Cut for length. (ooc: peyton, I hope you realize the pain)
Graveyard: My character will visit your characters grave
It happens often enough to make Jacqueline’s breath catch. A conversation with her husband about a piece of music: “Josephine loves that piece.” She has to remember to say loved. A whisper between folded fans at a ball, whispers about the eternally eccentric Lady Jacqueline causing her to turn her head leftwards, expecting her sister’s beautiful face, a warning smile tugging on her lips. Her eyes meet a wall, and her brown eyes fall. Her daughter crawling her bed during a storm; Jacqueline holding her child like how Josephine used to hold her many a-night, many a-time, letting her little sister bury her head in her shoulder when the thunder boomed.
“Mamma, where did Aunt Josephine go?” Little Jo asks, holding on to her mother’s hand tightly, a grey stone mark commemorating the life of an angel. It was so brutally unfair, Jacqueline thought. Josephine, so beautiful, so young, so unfailingly kind, dead. Dead, gone, and never to return. “Mamma, I know she’s in the stone, but where did she really go?”
“A good place,” Jacqueline tells her daughter with more conviction than she really felt, the sadness rushing over her like a tidal wave. “A very good place - what do you remember about your aunt?” It was a curious question, but Jacqueline had to know that her sister’s legacy was not stone. She had to know that it was as beautiful as the woman who used to be alive.
“I remember that she was very pretty,” Little Jo nodded. “Aunt Josephine and Uncle Felix talked about flowers often, and she used to rock me on her knee and tell me about what the both of you used to do as children. They were very pretty stories…Aunt Josephine was very wise, and very lovely.” Jacqueline’s breath caught, and maybe she could make peace with death after all.
Paint Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character drawing a picture of yours or vice versa
Jacqueline Manners enjoyed art very much, although she was perhaps the only person in the whole of England that could interpret her works. Josephine tried, and that was enough to make her belief that she was doing something well enough. She often managed to get her sister to sit down for a portrait - a portrait where her sister’s hair was indistinguishable from a caterpillar - but it was a rare circumstance when Josephine got Jacqueline to sit still long enough for even a sketch.
“Darling, you know I adore you, but could you please attempt to hold the pose?” That was about as harsh as Josephine could get with her sister, whose long brown curls dangled in loose, untamable spirals, pinned back only with a makeshift laurel wreath Josephine had made earlier. Her sister was supposed to be reaching upwards, a tambourine in her hands, as Jacqueline looked straight at her with a smirk. Her sister’s gangly arms were wobbling, and soon Jacqui had given up entirely on even attempting to attempt to the pose. “Sister, could you please?”
Her heart caught in her throat, eyes shifting from the tambourine she was tapping restlessly to her sister. Her very pretty sister, just shy and ten-and-eight. Jackie had just recently turned three-and-ten, knees almost permanently bruised, her features not yet grown into. She was so wild, yet without the beauty of the bloom she hoped she would grow into. It would be so easy to despise her sister - whose only perceptible imperfection seemed to be that she was so sad, an air of melancholy made even more despicable by her sister’s attempts to hide her sorrow. Josephine was too good a person, and the moon to Jacqueline’s vibrant, burning sun. Jacqueline loved her too much to ever contemplate hating her sister.
“I am trying, sister!” She called out, limbs framing themselves in the desire pose. And seeing her sister smile made the painful effort worth it.
Defend — I’ll write a drabble of my character protecting yours.
Her nine-and-tenth birthday was approaching - the August days grew more and more sweltering, the party being held on the date of her birth, the twenty-sixth as it were, was predicted to be the hottest day of the year. In later years, the Duke and Duchess would later claim that the day’s heat formed their daughter’s actions.
Josephine stood still, standing behind her sister, during the day - the moon being overtaken by the sun during the day. Dressed in pale blue muslin that matched her pale blue eyes, she was something like a moonbeam plucked from the sky and made into a woman. She looked quite pretty today, prettier than Jacqueline thought she could ever look. Apparently, several other gentlemen had thought so — one Lord Wellington, a bright young lad and eight-and-ten, whose eyes seemed earnest enough and whose manners seemed genteel enough that when he asked her sister to dance that Jacqueline attempted to suspend her disbelief.
“And so the moon manages to outshine the sun, even on the sun’s special day,” she teased. Josephine eyed her sister with something akin to annoyance.
“Hush, Jacqui. Lord Wellington is simply being polite.”
“Nonsense, Josie. He has been paying you particular attentions tonight,” she grinned brightly; that could perhaps be the greatest gift anyone could ever give Jacqueline: her sister’s happiness. “Look yonder! Wellington comes our way now.”
Lord Wellington asked Josephine to dance the next dance - a quadrille. A very appropriate dance, and Jacqueline would have believed her sister was enjoying herself if she did not know her so well. Her smile, demure, gentle, delicate, filled with well meaning artifice. Somehow Jacqueline knew what Josephine would later say, that that wicked Salvatore D’Ambrosio had her heart, and that it was too later for her to try again. But yet her and Wellington danced the quadrille.
Behind her shoulder, Jacqueline heard small snickers. “What a pretty little whore! Pretending to be as chaste as the virgin when we all know she is just a bit of muslin who lost her virtue a damned Italian!” No one had heard.
Marching over in great long strides, she turned to the blackguard’s who dared to insult her sister in her presence. “Pardon me sirs, I feel I have neglected to make you welcome at my gathering. Will you permit me to make amends?” The young gentlemen nodded, eyes flickering with base amusement. Jacqueline took a step forward, and punched the great cad right in the nose.
» : a future event my character would like to happen with them + yours
How could this day have come? And come so quickly? Jacqueline had no idea. Dressed in white, a bouquet of white roses laying on her bed, a carriage waiting to take her to the church - Jacqueline Theodora Manners was to be married. The very thought made her afraid - of course she loved her groom, loved him, or else she would have never dared to accept his proposal - but -
“Josephine — I am not ready.” Her sister smoothed down the slight wrinkle in her sister’s dress, voice as soft and reassuring as ever.
“Darling Jacqui, you are. You love him, do you not?”
“Of course I do!” Jacqueline answered hotly, color rising to her cheeks.
“Than you have nothing to fear.” Did you think the same about Salvatore D’Ambrosio? She wanted to ask. How could Josephine promise such a thing when she had known better than anyone love’s keen sting. Jacqueline did not need to say it - her silence spoke far more easily than her lips ever could.
“I am certain the Duchess and the Duke said the same on the eve of their wedding,” she said after another moment, the words biting.
“Never mind the Duke and the Duchess - listen to me Jacqueline Theodora Manning, you are not the Duchess. Nor is your groom the Duke. Your love will bloom eternally. Your vows will be kept. Your hearts will be constant.” Josephine sounded so sure, so sure.
“Josephine — I am ready.”
Sky & Solace: Our characters are stargazing + I’ll write my character comforting yours or vice versa.
“You know, sister it is usually I who track the stars,” Jacqueline observed, coming out onto the balcony where her sister stood. They would travel to London tomorrow, and the Season would begin. It would be Jacqueline’s second - no third time’s the charm would exist for her. She would have to find a husband, or else the Duke would choose one his youngest daughter. And yet, it was Josephine who stared out pensively at the stars in the evening chill that came with early Spring.
“You inspire me sister,” Josephine replied, but it was a sad sentiment. Something was on her mind. Stepping out onto the balcony, Jacqueline pointed out into the dark sky, towards a series of twinkling stars.
“That one over there is Cygnus. The swan,” Jacqueline said. “The swan in mythos represents….well, I do not quite recall, but hush. Do not tell Felix, he would be quite disappointed in me. But I do believe there was something about Zeus and a woman named Lela, and Helen of Troy?”
Josephine let out a low laugh, but it was genuine. The melancholy returned to her eyes, “Is it not sad that something so beautiful could becomes something so -” A single tear slipped down her cheek, and Jacqueline instantly knew what what was bothering her sister so, “ - so monstrous?”
“It is tragic, although I much prefer the story of Orion, another heavenly body. I actually remember this tale of woe: Orion was the lover of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Yet Apollo disliked him, so one day he bade Orion to go swimming. Waiting until he was far enough that only his bobbing head was visible, he found his sister, the great huntress Artemis, and challenged her to hit a distant target. Loosing an arrow, the goddess killed her lover.”
“…Sister, that is quite frightening!”
“You miss the point Josephine - the love of Orion and Artemis may have been killed, but she hung him in the stars —-”
“And he forever haunts her in the night sky,” her sister concluded. Her words were not sad, rather characterized by the absence of happiness.
“No, he tries to haunt her. Tries to follow her, bow poised with Cupid’s arrow, but Artemis cannot be hurt by Orion anymore. What is done is done, and the stars cannot ever hurt the goddess of the moon.” She jutted her chin defiantly, willing her sister to be strong, to not be hurt by the past’s shadow.
“Oh Jacqui! You do have a way of lifting my spirits!” And that lifted Jacqueline’s worries about tomorrow as well.
“Where was I? Oh yes, the constellation over there is Ursa Minor…”