[ There is a rustle of cloth as she shifts back so she can look up at him.

Alexandrie is not at her most beautiful. She wears none of her customary cosmetic to go to battle; it is replaced by the dust of combat, that dust cut through by the tracks of those tears that rimmed her eyes with red. Although the braid remains largely intact, the hair closest to her face is a muss of escaped tendrils, pulled half-free by his hand in them.

But in her eyes, what of them he can see in the gathering darkness, is the tranquility of a lake at sunrise. A kind of surety that can be no more denied than rain. ]

Loki.

[ It is soft, her voice a match to her eyes. The hand that traces his back withdraws, returns again as a whisper of a touch against his cheek. ]

Loving you is the easiest thing I have ever done.

It is like breath. It comes without thought; with thought it makes me calm and still. Stifled, I struggle. Taken, I die.

[ Dramatic, perhaps; but she is calm and still in saying it, as if it is something she knows as simple truth. Like rain.

Her thumb strokes along his cheekbone. ]

It is not the same, no. I would not wish it so. What is his is his.

[ A breath. ]

And what is yours is yours.