femmefroide (femmefroide) wrote in theunboundic, @ 2018-11-28 09:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! time: april 10 - 16, blair adler, portia marais, tucker belmont |
The ceilings are white
Who: Blair & House Belmont
What: Feast of Light (the re-imagining)
Where: Belmont Estate
When: Thursday, April 14, Evening
The preparations for the day had not gone well.
Blair had woken up with the same healing eye, the same exhausted body, and the same cold dread that she had been staying ahead of until the morning when she was finally forced to acknowledge the holiday. She’d snapped at the staff to arrange the candles she had gotten a hold of - red, for Tuck - if she couldn’t go traditional, she would lean heavily into something else and it was a thrill of itself, when she saw it coming together, and she allowed herself to secretly enjoy profaning the sacred today. She needed all the joy she could squeeze from what was supposed to be a happy celebration.
Making the buns had been a disaster; initially she ordered everyone out of the kitchen except for Portia in order to protect her fragile attempts at baking, but her shaky confidence was shattered by the arrival of Viola’s gift. After snapping the candle in half and dropping it into the kitchen fire with an uncharacteristic scream, she opted out of baking entirely and abandoned the whole endeavor - the buns and the feast - to Portia and the kitchen staff, though both were subject to frequent aggressive visits by an anxious, snappish Blair that ultimately did more harm than good to the preparations.
The entire day went like this, eating at Blair’s insides as she rushed around the manor to find fault in everything that was happening, pushing her cultivated cool to its very limits. At last, darkness fell, and Blair was forced to actually begin the one part of the holiday that she was arguably actually good at - the performance. She had plenty of white dresses to pick from, though few of them fit the traditional mold, and so opted for something a bit more modern, a bright red scarf tied around her slender waist like a gash.
As she rounded the corner on the second floor landing after dinner, her tray of treats balanced between her hands, she set her shoulders back and stared with cold remoteness at the gathered at the bottom of the stairs. Her crown was sparse, but with the ring of crimson, dripping candles it almost looked intentional, hard lines matching the way the shadows cut across the sharp features of her face. She descended with rigid elegance.
She’d never really participated in the holiday at home - her actual mother hadn’t been considered part of the family and thus wasn’t around, and everyone else felt like they were part of some other faction, one that she would never be a part of as much as her father pretended she was. She would never be expected to be Lucy, and hadn’t ever been prepared for it by the older women in her family, who fluctuated between distant and blatantly disdainful, especially around the holidays.
The day had been emotional enough, and as she reached the bottom of the stairs, she realized that she didn’t care that the candles were red, or that she hadn’t made the buns, or that the feast wasn’t perfect. She just wanted it to be over, and that night had come meant that it almost was. The thought alone was enough to give her what was probably her first smile of the day, and with the stress spooling around her shoulders making her dizzy, she spoke:
“Should we sing or tell the story next?”