[ It's the way she looks at him that strikes him mute on the spot. Like he's special, which he is, he knows this at his best moments, and yet. Like she cares for him already. Like he's something precious as opposed to something dangerous. Like this means something. He blinks around that final thought as she smooths his hair, laughs, touches his face, trying to fit it into his own personal cosmology of her, but he can't manage any words just yet.
What would he say? Please always look at me like that, perhaps, but no, too desperate. His breath shudders out in small gasps to match her terribly soft kisses. His hands reach blindly for her sides, finding the laces and fastenings for her armor there and undoing them swiftly.
Not until she speaks, and his ears register the faint clink of one of the buckles of his armor comes undone, does he regain his voice. ]
Glad to hear it.
[ In part because this is what he's doing, either way. In part, because it confirms for him that she has no reservations about the two of them at this moment, and that's important to him in a way that he wasn't prepared to ask questions about.
Whatever she is offering, whether this is only for now or if it an open door whose threshold he can't see beyond in this moment, he knows he'll accept it. Right now he is powerless to do otherwise in the face of her touch, her expression, her soft praise of his behavior. ]
[ Time has stepped away. Even farther from her, in here, than it had been at the fire, for the fire had flickered and crackled and let her know that the world outside them was still moving. The sounds of others had been nearer, every once in a while someone would walk between the tents and change the landscape with their presence.
Here, in the dim light of the latest afternoon's sun slanting against one canvas wall, the only other movement is the small breath of the wind and the little shadowed dance it makes of the leaves. There is nothing of man's design in it, and it makes her feel as slow and sure as trees. She is no god, no creature of forever, but right now? The pads of her fingers brush eternity along with the side of his face, the line of his neck until she loses it into the cloth and leather that still covers him. Which she wants to be gone; goes back to searching out how.
But there is so much to feel, so much to attend to. Even with the way she is trained and practiced in taking in vast amounts of information from the world around her, she is forced to flutter from sense to sense inside herself. Where her fingers feel for fastenings, find them, loose them. The warmth in the places where the undoing has let her in enough to touch the shape of him beneath, one layer closer to skin. The way the repeated bare press of her lips against the skin she can reachβ slow now, lingeringβ makes them tingle. The breath those presses shudders out of him that she wants to turn the whole of her to hearing, so much each one aches her heart with joy. Her own breath, a warm tickle in the space between her nose and lip as her closeness traps it between them. The smell of his hair, the way it is similar enough for her body to remember it as meaning safe. His hands on her, moving as hers do, nimble-swift in their quest to bare her to their touch. The solidity of his thighs, still held between hers. The faint effervescence of anticipating what that press of him against her will eventually mean. There is hardly enough room in her for all of this, what room could there possibly be for anything else?
He speaks, her kisses smile again, but Alexandrie finds she is saying everything she wants to be in silence. ]
[ He manages to free her of the armor protecting her legs without even looking at the fastenings there; some things remain familiar no matter the quality of the leather involved, after all. This, he sets aside, running his hands over the fabric still between him and her skin before undoing the laces on her pants, her boots. She'll have to stand to be properly freed of both, but that's a problem for a slightly future moment in time. Loki has no particular compulsion to be anywhere other than at his knees in front of her right now and thus moves onward toward her bodice.
Head full of sounds: her soft breathing against his skin, the unfastening of ties and buckles, his own breath rough and ragged as she touches him. Mind searching through hundreds of years of encounters, looking for something with the gentleness to match this... and finding nearly nothing. He'd eschewed such things in the favor of passions running high and hot and burning out like a firecracker in the chill night air. He is hurrying, but not so much that he'll damage her clothing or the leathers; his speed is distilled into a single-minded efficiency in unfastening, untying, peeling the leather away until he's exposed the sturdy cotton shirt beneath.
At which point he leans back a little to look at her and feels the last buckle of his own chest armor give way, sliding off his shoulders. They'll both have to stand, now, and he's only slightly annoyed at that reality.
It was better when he could just enchant his own clothes off of him.
Loki's hands settle at her waist, beneath the fabric of her shirt, before he swallows and slowly begins to push the material upwards. It'll mean she has to stop her kisses, at least for a moment, but he wants the expanse of skin available to his touch, to undo the bindings at her chest, to stand and rid himself of pants that feel too constricted as it is. ]
[ She is exulting in her success when the armor finally slides from him, means to begin divesting him of the soft brown cloth of his shirt β
And then his hands are on the curve of her waist, warm and bare on her body for the first time, and her gasp at how the feel of it pulls all her attention turns into a long inhale. Her eyes close involuntarily as he draws his fingers up along her sides, collecting the fabric of her shirt as they travel.
So much of her is in the moving place beneath his hands where their skin meets that recollection of what she had been doing is gone; her ability to stay in the world and balance is nearly gone, so much so that she sways a little, is forced to grasp for his forearms to steady herself. She will find enough presence of mind, at least, to lower her head and raise her hands to help him pull the shirt free of her when it becomes necessary. ]
[ There's something very beautiful and fragile in the way that his touch seems to shock her; he feels rather like he's been handed a crystalline flower and told, under no uncertain terms, not to break it. His mouth is open to ask if she's alright when her hands find his forearms and instead he swallows his breath and the question both, continuing on with freeing her from the shirt and tossing it aside with their small growing pile of clothing and armor before his fingers reach for the bindings across her chest.
This is dangerous, he'd thought earlier, but now he knows better. This is beyond that; this is a freefall.
The fingers of his right hand skim across her collarbones, draw a line down between her breasts, and then his hands are at her waist again. Lifting her up is easy; Thedas has not rid him of his strength, and he's glad for it in this moment as he rises to his feet just to set her down amongst the blankets and cloth that make the bedding. Loki sits on the edge there, watching her for a moment, eyes shifting between green and blue before he leans in and kisses her.
It's a soft thing, but there are still teeth to be had. His hands are busy multitasking, helping her out of the last of her clothes and prying off her boots, while his mouth covers hers. After a moment it's done, and he pulls away again, kissing her on the nose briefly before pulling off his own shirt, pants, toeing off his boots.
Cool air hits his skin like a breeze on an overwarm day; he's hard and aches with wanting her and yet he just sits there, tracing runes and patterns into her bare skin for a moment. He wants, but doesn't know in this moment how to bridge wanting and having, is afraid of what happens after when they have to return to a life involving other people. ]
[ He lifts her again and she is pliant in his arms. Breathless when he kisses her, a thing of helpless little gasps and sounds that clings, that whines quietly when he has to move away to take off her boots.
It is not until he kisses her nose and draws away that she is stirred from her reverie; the incongruous innocence of it bringing her back to herself. Her eyes flutter open, and she glows. Smiles at him under summer sky eyes as if she had slept and wakened and there was no-one in the world she would rather find herself next to, and wrinkles her nose sweetly.
Then she watches him; raising herself on her elbows in the blankets, her gaze tracing over the lines and shapes of him as he reveals them. Looking at the way the last light brushes highlight, pools in shadow, shifts and plays over him as he moves, intent and still as she is in the moments between choosing the land she will paint and when she begins to mix the colours she will use to save her sight of it forever.
And she loves him. She loves him like she loves the sea: because he is beautiful, and because she must. Because it was written in her bones when she was made.
Perhaps it was before she was made. Perhaps Thedas is the dream of gods, and somewhen, far away, unbeknownst to himself, the God of Mischief dreamed her into being. Dreamed another self for her, and finally has come to find her for himself.
Perhaps not.
But to Alexandrie it does not matter how a thing is true, it only matters that it is.
When he has bared himself and sits by her, traces figures across her skin as her husband was wont to do when he wrought his magic, when he was nervous, the runes are different. Not all of the patterns are. For a moment her eyes shine with tears of recognition, but she is smiling, and they do not fall. Instead she blinks them away, and sits up slowly to reach for him. To touch his hair, his face, run her fingersβ uninterrupted nowβ along the slope of his shoulders, down his arms. To take his hands. Tug at them gently. Pull him to her as she sinks back down. ]
[ Her eyes are wet and he wants, desperately, madly perhaps, to make her cry if only to kiss them away, taste the salt of those tears against her skin. He thinks he knows how he'd do it; cause her to shed tears not only of pain but perhaps of joy as well. It's all tied into wanting to whisper her name, the whole of it, over and over again so she has the memory of his voice shaping the sound to carry on with her.
Being unable to tell just how destructive of an idea that may be means that his lips part, but nothing is said. Loki swallows. Feels her gaze upon him.
Lexie looks at him with love; he's seen it before, but never directed at himself, not like this, searingly hot like the touch of the coldest thing to unprepared flesh. She looks at him, not just at the collection of poor decisions and bad behavior, not through or past him to only his name and his birthright or the shadow of his brother that falls darkest in his heart above all others. She sees him, this kaleidoscope of fragmented and frosted glass, and she gazes upon him with love in her eyes and so when she takes his hands his breath has gone shaky again and he laces their fingers together.
It's easy to be pulled down by her, and he intends to take his time, to kiss her face and her throat and her chest and her fingers. He wants to be sweet, and gentle, and memorable for her. The friction caused by the brush of his cock against the inside of her thigh as he settles between her legs has him reconsidering that position, causing him to gasp and shut his eyes long enough to reign his body's nerve endings into some semblance of behavior.
He lets go of one hand in order to cup the side of her face, fingers spread from the very edge of her lips to the lobe of her ear. His thumb pressed against her lower lip as he looks in her eyes for permission to continue forward. ]
[ Alexandrie is reconsidering her own position as he settles against her, albeit physically. She draws her knees a little higher to tilt her hips to better meet his, one of them continuing its journey, brushing his side to caress it on its way to lift and settle her leg at his waist.
She shivers at the way opens her to him, taking his thumb between her teeth to gently bite away some of how it overwhelms her simply to have the length of him pressed against her, how even so she lifts her hips to seek for more. Her breath already shudders shallowly, heart already pounds just to meet his eyes and see the question there.
For a long moment she stops breathing, holding still as she looks at him with a near painful vulnerability. And then she softens slowly. Her bite releases into a press of her lips. Her freed hand slides to rest just below his shoulder as if setting for a dance, the one that still holds his tightens its grip, and she exhales ]
[ She holds her breath and he remains perfectly still, mentally preparing for the worst (we shouldn't, we can't, please stop). Why else would she hesitate? He has so little pretense at this moment, open and wanting and nearly afraid that it's going to be taken away from him before he can even properly grasp it.
If she did ask him to stop, that would be it. He would rock back on his heels, give her space. It would have to be fine because he is many things, a great deal of them terrible, but the sort of man to ignore an indication to halt at this point is not one of them.
In some turn of a miracle, she doesn't turn him away. She says yes like it's a holy thing, settles him with a touch instead and Loki lets out a breath he hadn't noticed he was holding, some of the tension in his shoulders ebbing out beneath her hand. He moves the hand entangled with hers up above her head, slowly, and breathes as evenly as he can (which isn't that even at this point, really) as his hips slide against hers.
She's soft, and warm, and wet, and pliant, and he can't look away from her eyes. Scans across her face as he settles within her, having to catch his breath all over again. The hand at her face moves to tangle his fingers in the curls of her hair. ]
Alexandrie, [ he murmurs, soft as he moves against her, because a nickname is not enough when they're entangled and entwined like this. She had said she would break, if her name was uttered in his voice, and he'll take responsibility for that now. Will hold her pieces and allow her to reform in his hands. ]
[ In some distant part of her, even Alexandrie is surprised by the sound she makes to feel the solid glide of him inside her while their eyes are locked this way. While he speaks her name. It issues from a depth in her she had forgotten she had, so long it has been since it was touchedβ a gutted moan, low and round and open-throated as she arches into him. The leg she'd wrapped at his waist tenses, tries to pull him deeper as her hands clench; one around his, one digging the hard smoothness of her nails into the muscle of his shoulder.
And then too much. Suddenly far too much. He will be able to see the wildness of it in her eyes as she tries to focus and can't, hear the edges of her breaths turn sharp and desperate. She gasps a word in a language he won't know. A second in another language, this one matching the sounds of her accent. Then, in Trade: ]
Wait. [ She is curling into him as she can, burying her face in his neck, half-sobbing the words. ] Wait. [ And then ] Please. [ And then, brittle and frantic, ] Stay.
[ He freezes. How can he not? His hips still and he watches her, breathing heavily through the effort of it, a little furrow appearing between his brows at the foreign words to his ears, unused to being exposed to languages that aren't understood by Allspeak.
He wants to know what she's said. What he's done. Clearly, he was not as prepared for her to break as he thought, because his heart is in his throat and he can't swallow past it. She has every right to throw him out, he realizes; she'd only asked him for the one thing.
It's her voice at the end of that has him closing his eyes, stroking her hair. He won't move again otherwise. ]
I'm not going anywhere, [ he tells her, trying to keep his voice soothing, lips near the shell of her ear. ]Mitt hjerte i brann, hmm? I'm afraid you're stuck with me.
[ βuntil we perish, finishes another voice in memory. Another body covering hers. Different. The same. She is kissed, and held, and loved,
I shall keep you. Forever, I thinkβ ]
Where is he?
[ It is piteous and heartbroken and she does not expect an answer. She is not asking the man who holds her now, although she clings to him. She asks it of the world. For him, sobbed as she shakes her head against him: ]
Do not make me promises. Do not. The future is not anyone's to give.
[ She pulls back to look at him and in the glassy anguish of her eyes are the tears he had wanted, the salt against her skin. ]
Give me now. Do not say I can have anything more. I cannot bear it.
She clings, but she asks questions he can't answer and makes demands he would very much like to ignore. He knows that he can't predict the future, can't promise her he won't be yanked out of this place or fall through the Fade or whatever in Hel is supposed to have happened to make him arrive in the first place. He knows, but he doesn't care.
He would swear fealty to her if she'd let him.
Loki catches one of those tears as it escapes her eye and rolls down her cheek. Rubs it between his thumb and forefinger. ]
Whatever you want, [ he says seriously, somewhat aware that might not be... the thing she wants to hear, exactly, but it is the truth. ]
[ Truth for truth, delivered with a passion that lies as close to madness as she to him. There is no-one she has ever loved who has not left her. No-one she loves who she trusts will not. It is dark water in her foundation that crumbles and eats a yawning space beneath the fields above it, waiting for collapse. ]
[ The hand that has been holding hers all this time stretches its fingers out as he shifts his weight a little off of her. He intends to roll onto his side and pull her with him if she's willing to allow for that; to wrap his limbs and the blankets around her, and kiss her forehead. ]
I don't know how I got here, to your Thedas. I don't know what will happen tomorrow, or an hour from now. [ He brushes a few tears away. ] I do know this: as long as I'm here, you shan't be rid of me.
[ There's a moment before the shift when she tenses, so caught up in her fear of leaving that she cannot recognize a different kind of stay; but that last cry was the end of her fight, and when she lets him move them soon enough he is wrapped around her with his lips pressed to her head and the violent shudder of her slowly falls to stillness as he speaks.
There is never enough time, she remembers.
Eventually Alexandrie stirs herself enough to wrap herself around him in return as best she can, tucking her head beneath his chin, and nods there. ]
[ Loki lets her settle in his arms; holds her close but not too tightly, tilting his head so that she can arrange herself to be at a chin-resting height. For a long while he says nothing, just feels her breathe against him and listens to the muted sounds of the camp around them, watching the angle of the light through the canvas sink lower and lower.
When he does speak it's quiet; he's not entirely certain she's still awake. ]
[ He doesn't really know... what to say, in this moment. How anything about himself could be useful to her, right now. ]
I know that can't be easy.
[ Loving him. Any version of him. Because he is, at his core, a terrible and chaotic person. One who makes decisions based on how interesting the effects may be, and less on how good it will be for those involved. ]
And I know it isn't the same.
[ He isn't her husband. Who may still be alive; Lokis survive, after all. But who may not be, and in his focus on keeping the look in her eyes for himself he didn't completely think through what that knowledge must have been doing to her for the last seven months. ]
[ 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.
[ And what is mine? He thinks, in the same tone as a child who has been told that not everything is. Her love, apparently, and it is either trusting that, believing her words and her eyes and the weight of her in his arms, or perish.
What does he have to give her in return? A fallen god, from another world far away, and yet not even the first to his name here. His heart feels like such a small thing, a fruit that was left in the sun for too long, sweetnesses all gone bitter. She deserves something whole and hale and open for her, but it's all he has to offer.
His thumb comes up to rub across the plane of her cheekbone, a perfect echo of her gesture.
Loki opens his mouth to say something and then has to shut it again when the noise he makes isn't words but a small sob.
Shutting his eyes does nothing to stop the tears, but they're going to happen anyway. ]
Alright.
[ Does he even know what, exactly, he's agreeing to?
[ One heartbeat, two, and there is the gentle press of lips on his cheek. The pass of thumb across the other as she finds the tears and takes them. The taste of salt when her lips find his with a terrible tenderness.
There is quiet in her heart, finally quiet, and it beats into her body and makes her settle again against him like a sigh.
And then, on an inhale through her nose, that kiss has parted lips and asks for more. ]
[ That she captures his tears, that he can taste them on her lips, that he'd planned to cause the same to her is not lost on him at this moment. He witnesses it with a sort of detached awe.
She knows him and loves him and is very much like him and the dagger settling between his ribs turns.
It is not a shock, the tonal shift; her body is warm in his arms and his body still half remembers the feel of her around him. Besides which he's mentally somewhere beyond shock in the moment, somewhere that reminds him very much of falling through the Void. Yet Lexie's parting lips bring him solidly back into his body and into the moment. He kisses back, open and passionate and wanting all over again, pulling her close just in order to roll them further in his direction. This means that she ends up on top of his chest as he lays on his back, kissing her throughout. ]
[ At the end of the roll her knees quickly find their place on either side of him again. Her teeth tug at his lower lip, fingers splay to sink into his hair, to cradle the back of his head and exchange her ardor for his in equal measure.
At some point she pulls back to let free her hair. To rake quick fingers through the braid to turn it to a tumble of loose copper curls that curtain them in that scent of woody roses when she bends again to kiss him, dragging their soft tickle over his chest when she tracks her kisses from mouth to jaw, to shoulder; to nip at his collarbone and smooth the spot with her tongue before she is drawn upwards again by instinct memory to fasten her mouth and draw at the place where his pulse beats just below his ear that had always made her husband gasp. ]
[ When she pulls back his hands settle on either side of her hips, taking in the shape of her before he becomes distracted by the waterfall of hair suddenly available to him. The smell is heady and fills the space between them as they kiss, and Loki can't avoid gently pulling his fingers through those curls.
She bites his collarbone and he chuckles. She bites his throat and he gasps, closing his eyes and turning his head to expose more of his neck to her. Lexie could mark him from from head to toe and he thinks he would thank her for the opportunity. One hand moves to settle against the back of her neck, before drawing thin spirals along her spine. Loki is incredibly hard again and near breathless by the time Lexie moves on from his pulse point. ]
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no subject
What would he say? Please always look at me like that, perhaps, but no, too desperate. His breath shudders out in small gasps to match her terribly soft kisses. His hands reach blindly for her sides, finding the laces and fastenings for her armor there and undoing them swiftly.
Not until she speaks, and his ears register the faint clink of one of the buckles of his armor comes undone, does he regain his voice. ]
Glad to hear it.
[ In part because this is what he's doing, either way. In part, because it confirms for him that she has no reservations about the two of them at this moment, and that's important to him in a way that he wasn't prepared to ask questions about.
Whatever she is offering, whether this is only for now or if it an open door whose threshold he can't see beyond in this moment, he knows he'll accept it. Right now he is powerless to do otherwise in the face of her touch, her expression, her soft praise of his behavior. ]
no subject
Here, in the dim light of the latest afternoon's sun slanting against one canvas wall, the only other movement is the small breath of the wind and the little shadowed dance it makes of the leaves. There is nothing of man's design in it, and it makes her feel as slow and sure as trees. She is no god, no creature of forever, but right now? The pads of her fingers brush eternity along with the side of his face, the line of his neck until she loses it into the cloth and leather that still covers him. Which she wants to be gone; goes back to searching out how.
But there is so much to feel, so much to attend to. Even with the way she is trained and practiced in taking in vast amounts of information from the world around her, she is forced to flutter from sense to sense inside herself. Where her fingers feel for fastenings, find them, loose them. The warmth in the places where the undoing has let her in enough to touch the shape of him beneath, one layer closer to skin. The way the repeated bare press of her lips against the skin she can reachβ slow now, lingeringβ makes them tingle. The breath those presses shudders out of him that she wants to turn the whole of her to hearing, so much each one aches her heart with joy. Her own breath, a warm tickle in the space between her nose and lip as her closeness traps it between them. The smell of his hair, the way it is similar enough for her body to remember it as meaning safe. His hands on her, moving as hers do, nimble-swift in their quest to bare her to their touch. The solidity of his thighs, still held between hers. The faint effervescence of anticipating what that press of him against her will eventually mean. There is hardly enough room in her for all of this, what room could there possibly be for anything else?
He speaks, her kisses smile again, but Alexandrie finds she is saying everything she wants to be in silence. ]
no subject
Head full of sounds: her soft breathing against his skin, the unfastening of ties and buckles, his own breath rough and ragged as she touches him. Mind searching through hundreds of years of encounters, looking for something with the gentleness to match this... and finding nearly nothing. He'd eschewed such things in the favor of passions running high and hot and burning out like a firecracker in the chill night air. He is hurrying, but not so much that he'll damage her clothing or the leathers; his speed is distilled into a single-minded efficiency in unfastening, untying, peeling the leather away until he's exposed the sturdy cotton shirt beneath.
At which point he leans back a little to look at her and feels the last buckle of his own chest armor give way, sliding off his shoulders. They'll both have to stand, now, and he's only slightly annoyed at that reality.
It was better when he could just enchant his own clothes off of him.
Loki's hands settle at her waist, beneath the fabric of her shirt, before he swallows and slowly begins to push the material upwards. It'll mean she has to stop her kisses, at least for a moment, but he wants the expanse of skin available to his touch, to undo the bindings at her chest, to stand and rid himself of pants that feel too constricted as it is. ]
no subject
And then his hands are on the curve of her waist, warm and bare on her body for the first time, and her gasp at how the feel of it pulls all her attention turns into a long inhale. Her eyes close involuntarily as he draws his fingers up along her sides, collecting the fabric of her shirt as they travel.
So much of her is in the moving place beneath his hands where their skin meets that recollection of what she had been doing is gone; her ability to stay in the world and balance is nearly gone, so much so that she sways a little, is forced to grasp for his forearms to steady herself. She will find enough presence of mind, at least, to lower her head and raise her hands to help him pull the shirt free of her when it becomes necessary. ]
no subject
This is dangerous, he'd thought earlier, but now he knows better. This is beyond that; this is a freefall.
The fingers of his right hand skim across her collarbones, draw a line down between her breasts, and then his hands are at her waist again. Lifting her up is easy; Thedas has not rid him of his strength, and he's glad for it in this moment as he rises to his feet just to set her down amongst the blankets and cloth that make the bedding. Loki sits on the edge there, watching her for a moment, eyes shifting between green and blue before he leans in and kisses her.
It's a soft thing, but there are still teeth to be had. His hands are busy multitasking, helping her out of the last of her clothes and prying off her boots, while his mouth covers hers. After a moment it's done, and he pulls away again, kissing her on the nose briefly before pulling off his own shirt, pants, toeing off his boots.
Cool air hits his skin like a breeze on an overwarm day; he's hard and aches with wanting her and yet he just sits there, tracing runes and patterns into her bare skin for a moment. He wants, but doesn't know in this moment how to bridge wanting and having, is afraid of what happens after when they have to return to a life involving other people. ]
no subject
It is not until he kisses her nose and draws away that she is stirred from her reverie; the incongruous innocence of it bringing her back to herself. Her eyes flutter open, and she glows. Smiles at him under summer sky eyes as if she had slept and wakened and there was no-one in the world she would rather find herself next to, and wrinkles her nose sweetly.
Then she watches him; raising herself on her elbows in the blankets, her gaze tracing over the lines and shapes of him as he reveals them. Looking at the way the last light brushes highlight, pools in shadow, shifts and plays over him as he moves, intent and still as she is in the moments between choosing the land she will paint and when she begins to mix the colours she will use to save her sight of it forever.
And she loves him. She loves him like she loves the sea: because he is beautiful, and because she must. Because it was written in her bones when she was made.
Perhaps it was before she was made. Perhaps Thedas is the dream of gods, and somewhen, far away, unbeknownst to himself, the God of Mischief dreamed her into being. Dreamed another self for her, and finally has come to find her for himself.
Perhaps not.
But to Alexandrie it does not matter how a thing is true, it only matters that it is.
When he has bared himself and sits by her, traces figures across her skin as her husband was wont to do when he wrought his magic, when he was nervous, the runes are different. Not all of the patterns are. For a moment her eyes shine with tears of recognition, but she is smiling, and they do not fall. Instead she blinks them away, and sits up slowly to reach for him. To touch his hair, his face, run her fingersβ uninterrupted nowβ along the slope of his shoulders, down his arms. To take his hands. Tug at them gently. Pull him to her as she sinks back down. ]
no subject
Being unable to tell just how destructive of an idea that may be means that his lips part, but nothing is said. Loki swallows. Feels her gaze upon him.
Lexie looks at him with love; he's seen it before, but never directed at himself, not like this, searingly hot like the touch of the coldest thing to unprepared flesh. She looks at him, not just at the collection of poor decisions and bad behavior, not through or past him to only his name and his birthright or the shadow of his brother that falls darkest in his heart above all others. She sees him, this kaleidoscope of fragmented and frosted glass, and she gazes upon him with love in her eyes and so when she takes his hands his breath has gone shaky again and he laces their fingers together.
It's easy to be pulled down by her, and he intends to take his time, to kiss her face and her throat and her chest and her fingers. He wants to be sweet, and gentle, and memorable for her. The friction caused by the brush of his cock against the inside of her thigh as he settles between her legs has him reconsidering that position, causing him to gasp and shut his eyes long enough to reign his body's nerve endings into some semblance of behavior.
He lets go of one hand in order to cup the side of her face, fingers spread from the very edge of her lips to the lobe of her ear. His thumb pressed against her lower lip as he looks in her eyes for permission to continue forward. ]
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She shivers at the way opens her to him, taking his thumb between her teeth to gently bite away some of how it overwhelms her simply to have the length of him pressed against her, how even so she lifts her hips to seek for more. Her breath already shudders shallowly, heart already pounds just to meet his eyes and see the question there.
For a long moment she stops breathing, holding still as she looks at him with a near painful vulnerability. And then she softens slowly. Her bite releases into a press of her lips. Her freed hand slides to rest just below his shoulder as if setting for a dance, the one that still holds his tightens its grip, and she exhales ]
Yes.
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If she did ask him to stop, that would be it. He would rock back on his heels, give her space. It would have to be fine because he is many things, a great deal of them terrible, but the sort of man to ignore an indication to halt at this point is not one of them.
In some turn of a miracle, she doesn't turn him away. She says yes like it's a holy thing, settles him with a touch instead and Loki lets out a breath he hadn't noticed he was holding, some of the tension in his shoulders ebbing out beneath her hand. He moves the hand entangled with hers up above her head, slowly, and breathes as evenly as he can (which isn't that even at this point, really) as his hips slide against hers.
She's soft, and warm, and wet, and pliant, and he can't look away from her eyes. Scans across her face as he settles within her, having to catch his breath all over again. The hand at her face moves to tangle his fingers in the curls of her hair. ]
Alexandrie, [ he murmurs, soft as he moves against her, because a nickname is not enough when they're entangled and entwined like this. She had said she would break, if her name was uttered in his voice, and he'll take responsibility for that now. Will hold her pieces and allow her to reform in his hands. ]
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And then too much. Suddenly far too much. He will be able to see the wildness of it in her eyes as she tries to focus and can't, hear the edges of her breaths turn sharp and desperate. She gasps a word in a language he won't know. A second in another language, this one matching the sounds of her accent. Then, in Trade: ]
Wait. [ She is curling into him as she can, burying her face in his neck, half-sobbing the words. ] Wait. [ And then ] Please. [ And then, brittle and frantic, ] Stay.
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He wants to know what she's said. What he's done. Clearly, he was not as prepared for her to break as he thought, because his heart is in his throat and he can't swallow past it. She has every right to throw him out, he realizes; she'd only asked him for the one thing.
It's her voice at the end of that has him closing his eyes, stroking her hair. He won't move again otherwise. ]
I'm not going anywhere, [ he tells her, trying to keep his voice soothing, lips near the shell of her ear. ] Mitt hjerte i brann, hmm? I'm afraid you're stuck with me.
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I shall keep you. Forever, I thinkβ ]
Where is he?
[ It is piteous and heartbroken and she does not expect an answer. She is not asking the man who holds her now, although she clings to him. She asks it of the world. For him, sobbed as she shakes her head against him: ]
Do not make me promises. Do not. The future is not anyone's to give.
[ She pulls back to look at him and in the glassy anguish of her eyes are the tears he had wanted, the salt against her skin. ]
Give me now. Do not say I can have anything more. I cannot bear it.
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She clings, but she asks questions he can't answer and makes demands he would very much like to ignore. He knows that he can't predict the future, can't promise her he won't be yanked out of this place or fall through the Fade or whatever in Hel is supposed to have happened to make him arrive in the first place. He knows, but he doesn't care.
He would swear fealty to her if she'd let him.
Loki catches one of those tears as it escapes her eye and rolls down her cheek. Rubs it between his thumb and forefinger. ]
Whatever you want, [ he says seriously, somewhat aware that might not be... the thing she wants to hear, exactly, but it is the truth. ]
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[ Truth for truth, delivered with a passion that lies as close to madness as she to him. There is no-one she has ever loved who has not left her. No-one she loves who she trusts will not. It is dark water in her foundation that crumbles and eats a yawning space beneath the fields above it, waiting for collapse. ]
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[ The hand that has been holding hers all this time stretches its fingers out as he shifts his weight a little off of her. He intends to roll onto his side and pull her with him if she's willing to allow for that; to wrap his limbs and the blankets around her, and kiss her forehead. ]
I don't know how I got here, to your Thedas. I don't know what will happen tomorrow, or an hour from now. [ He brushes a few tears away. ] I do know this: as long as I'm here, you shan't be rid of me.
[ Is that close enough to forever? ]
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There is never enough time, she remembers.
Eventually Alexandrie stirs herself enough to wrap herself around him in return as best she can, tucking her head beneath his chin, and nods there. ]
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When he does speak it's quiet; he's not entirely certain she's still awake. ]
I've always been terrified of being alone.
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Sheβs awake, listening. ]
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[ He doesn't really know... what to say, in this moment. How anything about himself could be useful to her, right now. ]
I know that can't be easy.
[ Loving him. Any version of him. Because he is, at his core, a terrible and chaotic person. One who makes decisions based on how interesting the effects may be, and less on how good it will be for those involved. ]
And I know it isn't the same.
[ He isn't her husband. Who may still be alive; Lokis survive, after all. But who may not be, and in his focus on keeping the look in her eyes for himself he didn't completely think through what that knowledge must have been doing to her for the last seven months. ]
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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.
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What does he have to give her in return? A fallen god, from another world far away, and yet not even the first to his name here. His heart feels like such a small thing, a fruit that was left in the sun for too long, sweetnesses all gone bitter. She deserves something whole and hale and open for her, but it's all he has to offer.
His thumb comes up to rub across the plane of her cheekbone, a perfect echo of her gesture.
Loki opens his mouth to say something and then has to shut it again when the noise he makes isn't words but a small sob.
Shutting his eyes does nothing to stop the tears, but they're going to happen anyway. ]
Alright.
[ Does he even know what, exactly, he's agreeing to?
It doesn't matter. ]
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There is quiet in her heart, finally quiet, and it beats into her body and makes her settle again against him like a sigh.
And then, on an inhale through her nose, that kiss has parted lips and asks for more. ]
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She knows him and loves him and is very much like him and the dagger settling between his ribs turns.
It is not a shock, the tonal shift; her body is warm in his arms and his body still half remembers the feel of her around him. Besides which he's mentally somewhere beyond shock in the moment, somewhere that reminds him very much of falling through the Void. Yet Lexie's parting lips bring him solidly back into his body and into the moment. He kisses back, open and passionate and wanting all over again, pulling her close just in order to roll them further in his direction. This means that she ends up on top of his chest as he lays on his back, kissing her throughout. ]
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At some point she pulls back to let free her hair. To rake quick fingers through the braid to turn it to a tumble of loose copper curls that curtain them in that scent of woody roses when she bends again to kiss him, dragging their soft tickle over his chest when she tracks her kisses from mouth to jaw, to shoulder; to nip at his collarbone and smooth the spot with her tongue before she is drawn upwards again by instinct memory to fasten her mouth and draw at the place where his pulse beats just below his ear that had always made her husband gasp. ]
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She bites his collarbone and he chuckles. She bites his throat and he gasps, closing his eyes and turning his head to expose more of his neck to her. Lexie could mark him from from head to toe and he thinks he would thank her for the opportunity. One hand moves to settle against the back of her neck, before drawing thin spirals along her spine. Loki is incredibly hard again and near breathless by the time Lexie moves on from his pulse point. ]
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