[ Alexandrie is smiling, just beginning to pull away to slide out from between the sheets and into a dressing gown so she can see to heating water when she reaches a position where the light falls on him and she can see the whole of his expression, the way it looks like he does not seem to know how to hold that she loves him and she no longer wants to leave. Not even for the moment it would take to ring for Byron.
Without looking away she slowly settles down again, enough distance between them that she can watch his face, the hand that had half moved from his returning to the hold while her body keens with want of holding more.
[ Their fingers lace together as Loki opens his mouth to say something, draws breath, stops. He is tripping, falling over his own feelings for her, about her, and he has no idea where the bottom is.
But she does this, to him.
Maybe he should be used to it by now. ] No. [ As much a reply to that thought as it is a reply to her question.
He needs to pull himself together, here, and give her some kind of a proper answer. ] I thought... hm. [ He swallows, but doesn't break eye contact. ] That the familiarity helped, certainly, and that it didn't matter if that's what it was. All it was. Familiarity.
[ She has told him she's wished to know him, separate and individually from her husband and all their myriad similarities, and yet he's realizing he never fully internalized that concept until now. The idea that it could mean her husband returned and he was more than just a person Alexandrie shared history with?
He'd convinced himself that even if he did nothing wrong, that there was a possibility that was how it was going to shake out in the end. She'd get her husband back and he'd be extraneous, then. ]
Every time you offer me more than I expect and I... You say you've greeted me poorly and all I can think is that you've never done anything in the slightest poorly by my measure.
[ It's close but not an exact mark of what he's thinking and feeling in the moment. Mostly his brain is furiously trying to find the crack in what she's said, the place where he can resettle into his understanding of how he ends up alone anyway.
The misery of this thought process combined with the fact that they're close enough for him to still smell her perfume in the space between them go at war with one another in the line of his shoulders unhappily curling inward. ]
[ Pleasant words, for such a movement— that she has done nothing poorly— but in them, and in the ones that came before...
The only reason Alexandrie can think of that would make it not matter if she only loved the echo of her missing lord in him, that any else she offers is more than he expects, is that what Loki has learned to expect is famine. That he has lived by picking the pockets of love and slipping moments of warmth into his sleeves as he passes it and rather than railing at the ache of its loneliness he has come instead to believe this is his due.
Never.
Never, never, never again— she will never let this thing be truth again. The force of the feeling is in her body, the swift sure way she moves higher on the pillows so she can hug his head and shoulders to her chest and curl around them to press her nose and lips into the salt spray smell of his hair.
Surely there are words for this; she doesn't know them yet beyond an urgent whisper of ] That is not all it is.
[ There's no hesitance as he's pulled towards her, settling his head against her chest and letting out a noisy, shaky breath. The hand not in hers settles somewhere in her lap, fingers splayed out against the fabric of her nightgown. He feels so unsettled, so upset by this that it all feels foolish. He feels foolish, annoying beyond that, and tired of it all besides, but taking breaths and reminding himself that they are both here in the now helps, a little.
Her tone helps to an even greater degree.
He wants to say I don't know what's wrong with me, but that is not entirely true. He knows himself to be a broken and complicated sort of thing. There's a feeling of regret that instead of being happy like any normal person here he is... doing whatever this is. Feeling sorry for himself, perhaps, or being afraid of the very thing he wanted. ]
I believe you, [ seems like an important distinction to make right now. ] But part of me doesn't understand why.
[ Not why he believes her, but why it would be true to begin with. ]
[ Asked softly, still, although without the urgency of her first words. Her free hand is in his hair, patiently working through wind-tangles as she strokes her fingers through the strands.
The shake in his breath had made her heart squeeze unhappily in her chest, had burned away everything but the desire to cover him as a blanket might: keeping what warmth there was safe from the cold that snatched at it, whatever that cold might be. She doesn't know the whole of it, but she knows some; knows his birth father had left him to die, knows the long shadow his adoptive brother had cast, the lengths he had gone to in order to emerge from it...
And she knows the sharp and incredulous way her lord had laughed at the idea of her loving him, his uneasy ungainly softness when she had persisted.
Even in the middle of her own terrified fluttering it had broken her heart then, too. ]
I could tell you, [ she speaks against his hair. ] I could tell you down to the way you still when you are thinking, the way your fingers spread as if you could hold what you speak of when it excites you; but it will only be so much breath if you cannot understand for yourself why what I love in you should be worth loving, and you must understand in order to be loved.
That part of him would like to be indulged, surely, but. What would be the end result? Disbelief, probably, or an assurance that he has no control over whether or not she finds these parts of him worthy of love.
He could just trust her, instead. Terrifying, truly, but that emotion has rarely stopped him before. ]
Must I? [ Loki asks instead. ] Can't I just accept it? [ A strange miracle but a miracle nonetheless, surely. For a god who never practiced them. For a man who feels undeserving. He shuts his eyes and leans into her touch, the rhythmic pattern of her fingers in his hair. ] I don't want to ruin this, [ he whispers. It means so much more than he can hope to craft pretty words about. ]
[ There is a long silence while Alexandrie weighs the truth of what her mind had leapt to wanting to say. To make sure she does not borrow overmuch from the years of love she had known from another. To make sure it is his; for above all else she cannot lie to him in this. Above all else she cannot offer such a shelter and have it be made of anything that she knows might fall.
In the meantime her hand continues its movement. Her other holds his. She breathes slowly, tries to catch the scent of him beneath the sea.
And when she thinks it true, she whispers back ]
You cannot ruin this. Not if you love me.
[ She shakes her head only enough that her nose stirs his hair a bit before she settles again. ]
There will be storms, and waves— some like to crack the bow— but love me as constant as I will love you and we will find our way back always.
[ As she waits to answer Loki tries to quiet his mind's unruly gathering of thoughts. That she will tell him how he might ruin things and in that list, he will find something he knows will come to pass, knows himself capable of. Or she'll promise that he hasn't, yet, and perhaps that means
Alexandrie doesn't give him a list; instead, she tells him something his mind states is frankly impossible. But if he's believed her thus far doesn't that mean he has to believe her now?
Loki thinks to raise his head, to look her in the eye and see if... if what? She's lying? Instead, he sighs, closing his eyes and feeling her fingers with his. Her breath on his hair. Holds it, fragile as it is, this idea that he can't fuck it up as long as he loves her.
(People fall out of love sometimes. He knows this; he's not thinking about it. He doesn't think that he would, anyway. Doesn't think he's made that way.)
She has only told him the truth, this far, unless she's a better liesmith than he is. And if she is? He deserves it.
If she's not?
A small sigh, and then: ]
I do love you.
[ Still frightening, but. If so. He can't ruin it.
[ Hearing him say so makes her soft, makes her close her eyes and curl a little closer around him, her hand stilling in his hair so she can simply hold.
This is where she leaves things, so often; with the assumption that the way her body responds is enough truth told about her heart, a relic of the time when words and promises meant nothing.
But her body had meant nothing too. It had been as schooled, as crafted— a doll she moved to tell stories with down to the flush in her cheeks, the pound of her heart. Artifice, all. If her body can be salvaged her words can too, and she thinks perhaps he is as starved for them as she so often is.
So, quietly: ]
You cannot know, I think, what it means to me to hear so. How high I hold the value of your heart. How well I know how fearful it is to hold it out for someone else to touch after a life of learning nothing comes of that but breaking.
It is everything to me, [ she says, quieter still, a catch in her voice that she does nothing to remedy. ] You are everything.
My heart feels like a strange thing for anyone to hold value in.
[ Because he's done nothing but betray those that would have existed within its walls, and even as he's struggling daily to do something else, anything else, he is tired, and he is afraid that it will all be for naught in the end.
Still. He swallows, and shakes his head, shifting so he can sit up to actually look at her now. ]
I trust you with it more than I trust myself, however, and I would kill to keep any value in your eyes. [ He lifts their hands together and lets go just to press his lips to her palm, letting his eyes close again. ] I have never tried to love anyone before, it has always just... occurred; I am certain I will make mistakes.
[ For a moment she can smell the night blooming flowers of Minrathous, so strong is the memory that comes.
I will do poorly at this, you realize? the man she will marry is saying— his accent slightly different, the look in his eyes almost the same— You do not mind?
She cannot help but say it softly to them both, cannot stop the swift well and fall of a few tears even as she smiles. ]
[ He opens his eyes as she speaks again, and he doesn't know why she's crying, but he can imagine any number of scenarios and sometimes... often knowing 'why' doesn't change the nature of a thing, and so he doesn't ask.
He does, however, move his hand so that he can catch one of her tears with his thumb. ]
You're so patient with me, [ comes out quietly. He's always surprised by that about her, especially after a lifetime of never being good enough. ]
[ The tears have stopped, but Alexandrie knows well enough how many of them she contains. ]
You do so much for me and I fear you count it little— or not at all— because it is not born out of great effort or sacrifice; it simply grows from who you are as my patience with you— which seems a thing of wonder to you— grows from me.
[ Loki blinks in surprise at this evaluation of his behaviors and understandings because it's true, with a sort of frightening accuracy; he doesn't see it as difficult or even worthy of much consideration because it comes so easily to him to care about her, and to be patient with her.
She loves her husband and doesn't know if she's a widow or simply a wife during wartime. She loves him, for reasons expressed and unfathomable. How could he not be patient? How could he not care? ]
Sometimes we speak and it's not dissimilar from what I imagine listening to my own thoughts come spilling out in your voice would be. [ It's like a mirror of himself in a very... different way from Sylvie. Sylvie is like him but changed by experiences into something different. Someone different, someone stronger, someone with less smooth edges and no veneer at all to herself. Alexandrie is like him and shaped by those experiences to become something that looks and sounds and thinks as he does. ]
[ Her hand moves in his hair again, a gentle stroke that pulls a little at the end. ]
It was so, [ she muses softly, ] with him. We were different then; heartless with the fear of having hearts, capable of so much cruelty to get our hands on power that we thought would make us safe from the wounds that pained us even as we would not admit we bled.
[ A smile, as soft as her voice. ]
Scared, when we loved.
We grew together, in step as the finest set of carriage horses.
[ A long inhale through her nose, the quiet sigh of its release through parted lips. ]
And then he was gone, and I changed alone. A great deal.
And now you are here, and somehow we have found ourselves in step.
[ She looks down at Loki and smiles again, a thing of curious wonder this time. ]
I do not know how or why, but I do not need to any more than I need to know how stars are made to think them beautiful.
I could show you how the stars are made, if you wished to know.
[ His expression is soft, fond for her. He knows he could speak to how he used to be, 'heartless with the fear of having a heart', but that part of him doesn't feel far enough away to be spoken of so easily in this moment.
Sometimes, he's still terrified that he has a heart to love anyone with.
Sometimes include this evening, it would seem.
He reaches up to smooth away an errant curl that has escaped her braids for the evening, hand coming to linger on her cheek. ]
I would go back to being that person, I think, without you. It would be easier, a way to protect myself from everything I hate about the choices I've made.
I'm sorry he isn't here. Mostly for your sake, [ he admits, because. He's a petty creature at the worst of times. ] But I'll admit a curiosity about him. If we would be able to stand one another.
I do not know. Perhaps you would circle one another, made wary by what the other might know. Perhaps the differences would be enough that you should not feel the need to prove the better lest you find yourself unneeded or replaced.
[ Soft words, careful, with all the kindness she can put into her voice and touch. That will not happen; being unneeded, being replaced.
Amused, then: ]
Perhaps one day I should find you both leaning intently into the same book next to two cups of tea gone cold, or plotting some piece of mischief suddenly made possible by two.
I should have liked to see it.
[ Sometimes in the tenses of Alexandrie's words her husband is coming back, and sometimes he is gone. A sentence ago it was possible, now it is like speaking of a beautiful sunset she missed; something her heart could have loved, if it had been given the chance.
She closes her eyes and turns her face into Loki's palm with the same fragile smile that had kept company with her earlier tears. A breath, a soft sniff, and then she opens her eyes again and turns the smile to him. ]
[ He would also like to have experienced that. To know another variant, to be close to someone with such shared history and outlook. To meet the man that Alexandrie first gave her heart to.
Holding that idea, turning it over in his mind, examining it. It would have been fascinating. It would have been something quite strange, even. He would like to give her that if it were within his power.
It's the first time he's really considered it without the idea that they would be in competition on some level.
Rubbing his thumb across her cheekbone Loki lets himself be quiet while she draws herself in again, smiles at him. Loki smiles in return before he leans back on the blankets and pillows and casts an illusion into the air above the bed. ]
They're born from matter, spread between the stars, that become knotted together and heavy.
[ She gasps quietly at the beauty of it, leaning back along with him to settle into his shoulder, wanting to see it as close to the way he does as she can.
A moment of consideration, then— ]
Like water droplets come together when they touch?
[ That doesn't seem right. Water doesn't become smaller like this. Two droplets joined to become one are still the size of two. She hums and discards the thought to look for another one like it, furrowing her brow as she tries to understand the concepts of a larger universe through the earthly ones she knows, then tilts her head up to look at him when she does. ]
Like making a ball with snow?
[ On another occasion she might wait for an answer, but on this one the words are hardly from her mouth before she is distracted by looking back at what he's made. A moment later she is reaching out to touch it, making a soft delighted sound when it shimmers around the disturbance of her fingers. Her hand stills for a moment, and then she is making curving paths in it as she used to through her husband's, drawing the light of the illusion's breaking and reforming behind her with a childlike look of wonder in her eyes.
And then an equally childlike look at him to check and see if she is misbehaving followed by the soft spread of a shy smile. ]
Yes, but... they create their own gravity well, that pulls everything in towards the center, like how a ball dropped from a tree rushes towards the ground all on its own. Imagine that from all sides, a perfect sphere causing matter and dust from between the stars to orbit it.
[ He shifts and resettles so that one arm goes around her back, hand settling at her waist, as Alexandrie draws her fingers through the illusion, causing the green and gold sparking in her wake.
When she looks at him with that impish expression he can't help but smile, shifting the illusion to one of a closer image of a star's birth. He loves her fascination, her glee in the wake of his magic. It feels loving, and important, and he can't imagine a better audience to share his knowledge with. ]
Something similar happens when a star dies, as well.
[ The image above them changes, filling the room with bright light before he slows the illusion down so she can look more closely. ]
Sometimes they become black holes, little punctures in the fabric of time and space.
[ Like a ball dropped from a tree, or the matter that will make up a star, Alexandrie obeys his law of gravity: the moment Loki opens a space closer to himself with the wrap of his arm around her she is shifting into it, wriggling a little until she is tucked against him and letting one of her hands settle over his.
She is watching something made, watching something unmade; darkness turning to light and back again, darker than before there was nothing. Already it weaves itself into allegories for her— she cannot help the way her mind connects the things she learns— and she feels a little less alone, knowing even time and space can be broken by the loss of something beautiful and bright. ]
It depends wholly on the age and size of the star in question. If they don't become black holes they become neutron stars, which sometimes end up close to one another and collide like these. They're called kilonovas, when that happens.
[ She tucks herself in and he leans over to kiss her forehead. This is a lovely, perfect sort of moment, and he shifts from watching the illusion to watching the light spill across the planes of her face. ]
The light from the stars we've seen has traveled so far through space to reach our eyes here in Thedas — or on any planet really — that the light itself that we see is actually in the past, instead of showing the stars in the present.
[ Hushed with awe, and as much to herself as it is to him: ]
They are like us.
[ Alexandrie turns her face to look out the window for a moment, to find those points of light outside the illusion. They are no less beautiful for her new understanding of them— are, perhaps, more beautiful because they too are born and die and turn around each other and collide. Have children, in a way, with other stars. Linger bright in memory after they are gone. Are grieved for by the fabric of all things.
All of this is happening in the sky, far away. Farther away than she can understand, to a number of stars far beyond her ability to count them, this has been happening without her knowledge and suddenly everything in the world is something worth wonder.
But most of all him.
When she turns her face back, it is to look at Loki the way she did the stars. To follow him in watching not the illusion he had made but its light on him. She cannot keep from reaching to touch his face any more than she could keep from reaching for the stars he'd made. She cannot keep from shifting so she can kiss him any more than that. ]
[They are like us, she says, and Loki just smiles, soft and just for her. He doesn't disagree, really. They create their own cosmic weight, the two of them together, in a synchronous orbit until the moment at which something grand will change and the both of them, together, will alter the fabric of the very space that contains them.
That smile increases, warms, when she moves to touch his face. Leaning in to kiss her back is as easily done as breathing, his free hand coming up to touch her cheek in a mirror of her own gesture.
Above them, the illusion shifts to a slightly different image of stars and stardust. ]
I love you, [ Loki murmurs against her lips. Because it's true. Because in this moment it's a thing of wonder, not terror. Because he'd like to remember this moment for as long as he can remember anything. ]
[ In his closeness, with her eyes closed, Alexandrie finds herself surprised by the sea-smell of Loki's hair, the salt-roughness of his shirt against her skin. How long has it been, since she'd awakened to his return? A few hours? No. Hours are something for others, not them. They have a small infinity, something that feels as if it has no beginning or end, and all it takes is a single moment of shared attention— of her looking, of him looking back— and they can step into the slipstream of whatever in the cosmos paves their way. It's simple, right, and his love reaching to meet hers feels like a keystone settling into place between two stacks of stones that would have fallen on their own. That now will be a door long after all the walls are gone.
She kisses the words from his lips so she can keep them with the kind of care that means she thinks them precious; means she thinks he is. Wants to speak, wants to say her own for him, but cannot pull herself away for even the moment it would take to murmur. For now he will have to feel it in the way she leans farther into him, the turn of her body to better seam itself to his, the small and quiet sound that leaves her nose. ]
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Without looking away she slowly settles down again, enough distance between them that she can watch his face, the hand that had half moved from his returning to the hold while her body keens with want of holding more.
She doesn’t yet. She wants to see. ]
No?
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But she does this, to him.
Maybe he should be used to it by now. ] No. [ As much a reply to that thought as it is a reply to her question.
He needs to pull himself together, here, and give her some kind of a proper answer. ] I thought... hm. [ He swallows, but doesn't break eye contact. ] That the familiarity helped, certainly, and that it didn't matter if that's what it was. All it was. Familiarity.
[ She has told him she's wished to know him, separate and individually from her husband and all their myriad similarities, and yet he's realizing he never fully internalized that concept until now. The idea that it could mean her husband returned and he was more than just a person Alexandrie shared history with?
He'd convinced himself that even if he did nothing wrong, that there was a possibility that was how it was going to shake out in the end. She'd get her husband back and he'd be extraneous, then. ]
Every time you offer me more than I expect and I... You say you've greeted me poorly and all I can think is that you've never done anything in the slightest poorly by my measure.
[ It's close but not an exact mark of what he's thinking and feeling in the moment. Mostly his brain is furiously trying to find the crack in what she's said, the place where he can resettle into his understanding of how he ends up alone anyway.
The misery of this thought process combined with the fact that they're close enough for him to still smell her perfume in the space between them go at war with one another in the line of his shoulders unhappily curling inward. ]
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The only reason Alexandrie can think of that would make it not matter if she only loved the echo of her missing lord in him, that any else she offers is more than he expects, is that what Loki has learned to expect is famine. That he has lived by picking the pockets of love and slipping moments of warmth into his sleeves as he passes it and rather than railing at the ache of its loneliness he has come instead to believe this is his due.
Never.
Never, never, never again— she will never let this thing be truth again. The force of the feeling is in her body, the swift sure way she moves higher on the pillows so she can hug his head and shoulders to her chest and curl around them to press her nose and lips into the salt spray smell of his hair.
Surely there are words for this; she doesn't know them yet beyond an urgent whisper of ] That is not all it is.
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Her tone helps to an even greater degree.
He wants to say I don't know what's wrong with me, but that is not entirely true. He knows himself to be a broken and complicated sort of thing. There's a feeling of regret that instead of being happy like any normal person here he is... doing whatever this is. Feeling sorry for himself, perhaps, or being afraid of the very thing he wanted. ]
I believe you, [ seems like an important distinction to make right now. ] But part of me doesn't understand why.
[ Not why he believes her, but why it would be true to begin with. ]
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[ Asked softly, still, although without the urgency of her first words. Her free hand is in his hair, patiently working through wind-tangles as she strokes her fingers through the strands.
The shake in his breath had made her heart squeeze unhappily in her chest, had burned away everything but the desire to cover him as a blanket might: keeping what warmth there was safe from the cold that snatched at it, whatever that cold might be. She doesn't know the whole of it, but she knows some; knows his birth father had left him to die, knows the long shadow his adoptive brother had cast, the lengths he had gone to in order to emerge from it...
And she knows the sharp and incredulous way her lord had laughed at the idea of her loving him, his uneasy ungainly softness when she had persisted.
Even in the middle of her own terrified fluttering it had broken her heart then, too. ]
I could tell you, [ she speaks against his hair. ] I could tell you down to the way you still when you are thinking, the way your fingers spread as if you could hold what you speak of when it excites you; but it will only be so much breath if you cannot understand for yourself why what I love in you should be worth loving, and you must understand in order to be loved.
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[ Does it?
That part of him would like to be indulged, surely, but. What would be the end result? Disbelief, probably, or an assurance that he has no control over whether or not she finds these parts of him worthy of love.
He could just trust her, instead. Terrifying, truly, but that emotion has rarely stopped him before. ]
Must I? [ Loki asks instead. ] Can't I just accept it? [ A strange miracle but a miracle nonetheless, surely. For a god who never practiced them. For a man who feels undeserving. He shuts his eyes and leans into her touch, the rhythmic pattern of her fingers in his hair. ] I don't want to ruin this, [ he whispers. It means so much more than he can hope to craft pretty words about. ]
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In the meantime her hand continues its movement. Her other holds his. She breathes slowly, tries to catch the scent of him beneath the sea.
And when she thinks it true, she whispers back ]
You cannot ruin this. Not if you love me.
[ She shakes her head only enough that her nose stirs his hair a bit before she settles again. ]
There will be storms, and waves— some like to crack the bow— but love me as constant as I will love you and we will find our way back always.
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Alexandrie doesn't give him a list; instead, she tells him something his mind states is frankly impossible. But if he's believed her thus far doesn't that mean he has to believe her now?
Loki thinks to raise his head, to look her in the eye and see if... if what? She's lying? Instead, he sighs, closing his eyes and feeling her fingers with his. Her breath on his hair. Holds it, fragile as it is, this idea that he can't fuck it up as long as he loves her.
(People fall out of love sometimes. He knows this; he's not thinking about it. He doesn't think that he would, anyway. Doesn't think he's made that way.)
She has only told him the truth, this far, unless she's a better liesmith than he is. And if she is? He deserves it.
If she's not?
A small sigh, and then: ]
I do love you.
[ Still frightening, but. If so. He can't ruin it.
What a strange reality to encounter. ]
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This is where she leaves things, so often; with the assumption that the way her body responds is enough truth told about her heart, a relic of the time when words and promises meant nothing.
But her body had meant nothing too. It had been as schooled, as crafted— a doll she moved to tell stories with down to the flush in her cheeks, the pound of her heart. Artifice, all. If her body can be salvaged her words can too, and she thinks perhaps he is as starved for them as she so often is.
So, quietly: ]
You cannot know, I think, what it means to me to hear so. How high I hold the value of your heart. How well I know how fearful it is to hold it out for someone else to touch after a life of learning nothing comes of that but breaking.
It is everything to me, [ she says, quieter still, a catch in her voice that she does nothing to remedy. ] You are everything.
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[ Because he's done nothing but betray those that would have existed within its walls, and even as he's struggling daily to do something else, anything else, he is tired, and he is afraid that it will all be for naught in the end.
Still. He swallows, and shakes his head, shifting so he can sit up to actually look at her now. ]
I trust you with it more than I trust myself, however, and I would kill to keep any value in your eyes. [ He lifts their hands together and lets go just to press his lips to her palm, letting his eyes close again. ] I have never tried to love anyone before, it has always just... occurred; I am certain I will make mistakes.
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I will do poorly at this, you realize? the man she will marry is saying— his accent slightly different, the look in his eyes almost the same— You do not mind?
She cannot help but say it softly to them both, cannot stop the swift well and fall of a few tears even as she smiles. ]
I do not mind.
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He does, however, move his hand so that he can catch one of her tears with his thumb. ]
You're so patient with me, [ comes out quietly. He's always surprised by that about her, especially after a lifetime of never being good enough. ]
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[ She leans into his touch as best she can. ]
You are patient with me too.
[ The tears have stopped, but Alexandrie knows well enough how many of them she contains. ]
You do so much for me and I fear you count it little— or not at all— because it is not born out of great effort or sacrifice; it simply grows from who you are as my patience with you— which seems a thing of wonder to you— grows from me.
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She loves her husband and doesn't know if she's a widow or simply a wife during wartime. She loves him, for reasons expressed and unfathomable. How could he not be patient? How could he not care? ]
Sometimes we speak and it's not dissimilar from what I imagine listening to my own thoughts come spilling out in your voice would be. [ It's like a mirror of himself in a very... different way from Sylvie. Sylvie is like him but changed by experiences into something different. Someone different, someone stronger, someone with less smooth edges and no veneer at all to herself. Alexandrie is like him and shaped by those experiences to become something that looks and sounds and thinks as he does. ]
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[ Her hand moves in his hair again, a gentle stroke that pulls a little at the end. ]
It was so, [ she muses softly, ] with him. We were different then; heartless with the fear of having hearts, capable of so much cruelty to get our hands on power that we thought would make us safe from the wounds that pained us even as we would not admit we bled.
[ A smile, as soft as her voice. ]
Scared, when we loved.
We grew together, in step as the finest set of carriage horses.
[ A long inhale through her nose, the quiet sigh of its release through parted lips. ]
And then he was gone, and I changed alone. A great deal.
And now you are here, and somehow we have found ourselves in step.
[ She looks down at Loki and smiles again, a thing of curious wonder this time. ]
I do not know how or why, but I do not need to any more than I need to know how stars are made to think them beautiful.
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[ His expression is soft, fond for her. He knows he could speak to how he used to be, 'heartless with the fear of having a heart', but that part of him doesn't feel far enough away to be spoken of so easily in this moment.
Sometimes, he's still terrified that he has a heart to love anyone with.
Sometimes include this evening, it would seem.
He reaches up to smooth away an errant curl that has escaped her braids for the evening, hand coming to linger on her cheek. ]
I would go back to being that person, I think, without you. It would be easier, a way to protect myself from everything I hate about the choices I've made.
I'm sorry he isn't here. Mostly for your sake, [ he admits, because. He's a petty creature at the worst of times. ] But I'll admit a curiosity about him. If we would be able to stand one another.
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[ Soft words, careful, with all the kindness she can put into her voice and touch. That will not happen; being unneeded, being replaced.
Amused, then: ]
Perhaps one day I should find you both leaning intently into the same book next to two cups of tea gone cold, or plotting some piece of mischief suddenly made possible by two.
I should have liked to see it.
[ Sometimes in the tenses of Alexandrie's words her husband is coming back, and sometimes he is gone. A sentence ago it was possible, now it is like speaking of a beautiful sunset she missed; something her heart could have loved, if it had been given the chance.
She closes her eyes and turns her face into Loki's palm with the same fragile smile that had kept company with her earlier tears. A breath, a soft sniff, and then she opens her eyes again and turns the smile to him. ]
How are stars made?
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Holding that idea, turning it over in his mind, examining it. It would have been fascinating. It would have been something quite strange, even. He would like to give her that if it were within his power.
It's the first time he's really considered it without the idea that they would be in competition on some level.
Rubbing his thumb across her cheekbone Loki lets himself be quiet while she draws herself in again, smiles at him. Loki smiles in return before he leans back on the blankets and pillows and casts an illusion into the air above the bed. ]
They're born from matter, spread between the stars, that become knotted together and heavy.
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A moment of consideration, then— ]
Like water droplets come together when they touch?
[ That doesn't seem right. Water doesn't become smaller like this. Two droplets joined to become one are still the size of two. She hums and discards the thought to look for another one like it, furrowing her brow as she tries to understand the concepts of a larger universe through the earthly ones she knows, then tilts her head up to look at him when she does. ]
Like making a ball with snow?
[ On another occasion she might wait for an answer, but on this one the words are hardly from her mouth before she is distracted by looking back at what he's made. A moment later she is reaching out to touch it, making a soft delighted sound when it shimmers around the disturbance of her fingers. Her hand stills for a moment, and then she is making curving paths in it as she used to through her husband's, drawing the light of the illusion's breaking and reforming behind her with a childlike look of wonder in her eyes.
And then an equally childlike look at him to check and see if she is misbehaving followed by the soft spread of a shy smile. ]
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[ He shifts and resettles so that one arm goes around her back, hand settling at her waist, as Alexandrie draws her fingers through the illusion, causing the green and gold sparking in her wake.
When she looks at him with that impish expression he can't help but smile, shifting the illusion to one of a closer image of a star's birth. He loves her fascination, her glee in the wake of his magic. It feels loving, and important, and he can't imagine a better audience to share his knowledge with. ]
Something similar happens when a star dies, as well.
[ The image above them changes, filling the room with bright light before he slows the illusion down so she can look more closely. ]
Sometimes they become black holes, little punctures in the fabric of time and space.
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She is watching something made, watching something unmade; darkness turning to light and back again, darker than before there was nothing. Already it weaves itself into allegories for her— she cannot help the way her mind connects the things she learns— and she feels a little less alone, knowing even time and space can be broken by the loss of something beautiful and bright. ]
Only sometimes?
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[ She tucks herself in and he leans over to kiss her forehead. This is a lovely, perfect sort of moment, and he shifts from watching the illusion to watching the light spill across the planes of her face. ]
The light from the stars we've seen has traveled so far through space to reach our eyes here in Thedas — or on any planet really — that the light itself that we see is actually in the past, instead of showing the stars in the present.
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They are like us.
[ Alexandrie turns her face to look out the window for a moment, to find those points of light outside the illusion. They are no less beautiful for her new understanding of them— are, perhaps, more beautiful because they too are born and die and turn around each other and collide. Have children, in a way, with other stars. Linger bright in memory after they are gone. Are grieved for by the fabric of all things.
All of this is happening in the sky, far away. Farther away than she can understand, to a number of stars far beyond her ability to count them, this has been happening without her knowledge and suddenly everything in the world is something worth wonder.
But most of all him.
When she turns her face back, it is to look at Loki the way she did the stars. To follow him in watching not the illusion he had made but its light on him. She cannot keep from reaching to touch his face any more than she could keep from reaching for the stars he'd made. She cannot keep from shifting so she can kiss him any more than that. ]
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That smile increases, warms, when she moves to touch his face. Leaning in to kiss her back is as easily done as breathing, his free hand coming up to touch her cheek in a mirror of her own gesture.
Above them, the illusion shifts to a slightly different image of stars and stardust. ]
I love you, [ Loki murmurs against her lips. Because it's true. Because in this moment it's a thing of wonder, not terror. Because he'd like to remember this moment for as long as he can remember anything. ]
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She kisses the words from his lips so she can keep them with the kind of care that means she thinks them precious; means she thinks he is. Wants to speak, wants to say her own for him, but cannot pull herself away for even the moment it would take to murmur. For now he will have to feel it in the way she leans farther into him, the turn of her body to better seam itself to his, the small and quiet sound that leaves her nose. ]
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