Wild Roses Prompt 052 "Fire"

[taennyn]

Title: Survivor
’Verse/characters: Wild Roses, (Madeleine Sabaey, Jasmine Sabaey)
Prompt: 052 "Fire"
Word Count: 362
Rating: PG
Notes: These two are old--far older than Sebastian, Isael and Aodh. They lived through the Rosenthal War (well over a thousand years before this snip), though not undamaged.

It was a spectacular dress, a heavy silk-satin black fabric, halter-necked and almost entirely backless, the halter holding it above and the low slung belt buckled just below the curve of hipbones holding it below. Jet and hematite fringe stitched to the skirt, making every move a shimmy of black and narrow silver beads.

Long cigarette holder held easily between the first and second fingers on her right hand, the smoke of the cigarette another way of emphasizing the way she moved.

Not that she needed it. The firebird painted all across her naked back did that all on its own, the neck of the bird disappearing up the back of her neck and re-emerging from the high-swept tiny flame-bright braids pinned to her head as a bronze-cast bird’s head, the beginning of the wings painted across her shoulderblades, then continued in a light-cast illusion along the majority of her arms, half-visible primary feathers fluttering in the wind of other people’s passage.

Her escort was as blonde and pale as she was fiery and dark, plain-cut dark-brown tweed trousers and suit-coat a suitable frame for her dress. From behind it might take a moment to recognize the escort as a woman--clever tailoring and that many merchants and sailors wore their hair long, and braided it as neatly. But woman she was, and beautiful in a distant way.


If you had the memory for it--or one of the few paintings left of the period--there had been a time when the escort would have been the one in a spectacular dress, her naturally straight hair an artful tumble of curls, her hands painted with dragon scales and her face masked with close-stitched wyvern leather, horns mostly hidden by her hair. She would have danced barefoot and fearless among booted sailors, sure of her own ability to dodge if not her partner’s skill.

But that was years ago, before a war no-one cared to name in the presence of so many of the Family.

So it is Madeleine Arianhrod’s-daughter who wears the paint of firebirds, not Jasmine Pierre’s-daughter in the scales of dragons. The softly broken daughter of a long dead Prince.

Comments

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

:: pets the pretty dresses::

[taennyn]

Think the inspiration for Madeleine's was the 1920s flapper style dresses. Stuff you can dance the charleston or the lindy hop in. kind of unusual in tha' from the front or the back, it's really quite a symmetrical dress. Just when you look at the side, you get the Stunningly Assymetrical effect. :)

[nessa5.livejournal.com]

very pretty, and sad
I espescally like the line

She would have danced barefoot and fearless among booted sailors, sure of her own ability to dodge if not her partner’s skill.

[zero_pixel_count]

Yeah. Shiny line.

(But I've had a soft spot for barefoot dancers since the day a friend of mine refused to dance on the grounds that she had boots on, and my brain went 'twang' and I spent the rest of the gig scribbling lyrics on the back of a beermat).

[taennyn]

This is an excellent reason to have such a soft spot. Shiny sort of memory to keep close.

*grins* But then, I've gone ballroom dancing in jeans and riding boots, so I'm rather on the opposite end of hte spectrum. (jitterbugging was Interesting)

[taennyn]

Thank you. :) I'm glad to know the sadness came across.

[goshawk.livejournal.com]

Oooh. Pretty dress shinies. ::peers::

[taennyn]

Kinda . . couture? Immensely assymetric, a lot of the time--sometimes to the point where people will wear pants or a complete shirt in a neutral colour to keep drafts out of interesting places--a lot of interesting draping and folding. And rich, rich fabrics.

For dressy clothes, anyway. Work clothes are plainer, with the variation and assymetries in the embroidery or the varigation of the cloth-dying.

[billradish.livejournal.com]

..?

(argh?)

[taennyn]

*pulls clothes out of closet, demonstrates!*

[tsuki-no-bara.livejournal.com]

oh my god, that's beautiful. i especially like the illusion of feathers fluttering as people pass.

(and the rosenthal war just makes me giggle.)

[klgaffney.livejournal.com]

i love that they're still and always together, and the different snapshots through time, their more subtle and gradual changes woven through the drastic changes everywhere else, and new generations appearing around them.

mad love for that very spectacular dress, which i can picture just perfectly, and and a different sort of love for the contrast and it really does want to be a softly tinted old photo, maybe a bit wrinkled in the corner, altho i imagine the lovely illusion does not photograph well?

[taennyn]

It took them a while to be together-together but yeah, once so, they just . . settled. :)

It'd photograph, I suspect, but you'd lose half the effect because you'd get a still frame, instead of the ripples of not-ther feathers in the air currents of the room.