[ 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. ]
[ It's strange, to know someone enough to understand the things they don't say. Words don't escape her but he hears I love you, too in the sound she exhales, the press of her body against his, the feel of her lips as he smiles into their kiss. There's desire in the pit of his stomach but there's always desire when he's around her, he knows, and thus the ember is left alone for now.
He'd rather enjoy kissing her for a while more before he has to decide for or against taking a bath as the next step in the evening.
That doesn't mean he won't intensify the kiss, lips parting across hers. He breathes out through his nose, soft but a touch needy, wanting her to remain there kissing him for as long as possible. ]
[ Which she will; wanting for the moment, as he does, to simply breathe shared air. To linger in each touch of lips like she walks through the halls of a gallery, that slow pace that means she has all the time she could want to experience the art displayed for her.
It is art, in a way. Her kind. Spaces wide and beautiful by their nature; their light, their wind. It is always summer in her paintings. Not the sultry evenings, but the clarity and quiet of early morning. The slanting sunlight later in the season. Ripe wheat, flowers in full bloom, the light making verdant Serault glass of the leaves.
It is like this in her heart. With her fingers spread at the side of his face— their tips delicate at his ear, along his jawline— she kisses him like summer.
[ During the time they kiss the illusion fades, fading away in a light shower of green and gold sparks that settle in their hair before dissipating completely. Later Loki will have feelings about how long he could maintain that before it vanished entirely but for now, he's too busy kissing and being kissed for it to matter even a little bit.
His lips tingle and his breathing is heavier by the point that they break for air, Loki rubbing the tip of his nose alongside Alexandrie's. ] I've missed you terribly, [ he admits. ] The next time I leave I'll have to take a token along with me, and hide it.
[ Alexandrie makes a pleased little hum to have been missed and returns the rub with her own nose. Another hum, thoughtful this time, for what she might give.
A moment, and then she smiles. Disentangles herself enough to sit up— with a kiss for his forehead on the way— so he can better see her as she unties the ribbon that secures her braid and fingercombs free the bright copper of her curls, pulling them forward over her shoulders when she is done and separating one out to tickle the tip of Loki’s nose with. ]
You must pick the one you like the very best and take it with you.
[ She is so prideful of her hair, so careful in its keeping. The ready willingness of the offer speaks louder of her heart than words could ever manage. ]
Then any time I am combing my hair in the mornings and come upon one which is shorter than the rest I shall remember there is part of me with you and I, too, shall feel a little less alone.
Not just because of what it means, to have someone who is as particular about their hair as Alexandrie clearly is (and he knows this, has watched her morning routine more than once now, and each time is astounded by the work and the care that goes into it), but because it reminds him of Sif, and the terribly cruel joke he'd played on her in regards to cutting her hair.
So he blinks a little, tilting his head and smiling sweetly after a moment, looking away from her face to take in the shape of her hair cascading around it. He reaches out and pulls his fingers carefully through a section of her hair, shaking his head a little bit. ]
An entire strand of curls? [ Loki asks, voice full of wonder. If Sif could see him now, she'd laugh in his face, he thinks, and he'd deserve it. ]
Of whatever length you like, [ she answers, glowing a little under the wonder the bare thought of it had birthed in him.
It's an impetuous thing, perhaps, but somehow it does not feel like anything of the sort. It is simple: he had wanted something of her for his travels, she wishes it as much as he does, and it is the most intimate thing she can give. Far more than a handkerchief, a ribbon, even if she were to soak it in the summer rose of her perfume. Those things are hers, but they are not of her. This is.
It is for them when one of them is gone, and for them when they are together. She might find those missing strands in the mornings, as she'd said, but when he is here with his hands in her hair Loki will sometimes find them too; a reminder that one night she'd made a choice and it was him. ]
[ A strand long enough to braid, he thinks, or at least decorate around a ribbon or a small hooped earring, and one from closest to the center as opposed to something that will immediately be spotted when Alexandrie has her hair put up.
He separates one set of strands out, looping the hair around his index finger. ]
The last time I cut someone's hair it was to be unkind. [ He shakes his head a little; no one's ever given him a token like this, much less offered to allow him to choose it himself. ] Do we have scissors?
[ He has his daggers (one, at least, always, hidden away and summonable; the second is in his pack) if not, and they're definitely sharp enough for this business. ]
[ There are scissors somewhere, surely— with her embroidery perhaps— but Alexandrie doesn't wish to break apart the moment with a search, and she knows she doesn't need to. ]
What was it you used the last time, [ she asks, looking down for a moment with a smile at the soft shine of the hair he'd chosen that wraps his finger, the private little pleasure it gives her to think it already his, and then back to his eyes. ] When you were being unkind.
[ Every time she smiles at him it's some new wonder. He marvels at that, at how she can be so soft with him in so many circumstances. ]
A dagger, certainly.
[ He sets his other, unoccupied hand in his lap, summoning the dagger there and turning it by the handle so that the blade points towards his leg and doesn't point towards Alexandrie. ]
Edited (good lord where did all that extra space come from) 2021-09-23 00:25 (UTC)
Then use it now, [ she says, her voice like the smallest feathers of a bird that trusts itself to touch, ] so you may remember ever after that something that has only ever harmed can love as well.
[ Her eyes are luminous as she reaches for the dagger, lifts it with care, and deftly turns it in her hand to offer him the hilt. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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. ]
no subject
He'd rather enjoy kissing her for a while more before he has to decide for or against taking a bath as the next step in the evening.
That doesn't mean he won't intensify the kiss, lips parting across hers. He breathes out through his nose, soft but a touch needy, wanting her to remain there kissing him for as long as possible. ]
no subject
It is art, in a way. Her kind. Spaces wide and beautiful by their nature; their light, their wind. It is always summer in her paintings. Not the sultry evenings, but the clarity and quiet of early morning. The slanting sunlight later in the season. Ripe wheat, flowers in full bloom, the light making verdant Serault glass of the leaves.
It is like this in her heart. With her fingers spread at the side of his face— their tips delicate at his ear, along his jawline— she kisses him like summer.
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His lips tingle and his breathing is heavier by the point that they break for air, Loki rubbing the tip of his nose alongside Alexandrie's. ] I've missed you terribly, [ he admits. ] The next time I leave I'll have to take a token along with me, and hide it.
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A moment, and then she smiles. Disentangles herself enough to sit up— with a kiss for his forehead on the way— so he can better see her as she unties the ribbon that secures her braid and fingercombs free the bright copper of her curls, pulling them forward over her shoulders when she is done and separating one out to tickle the tip of Loki’s nose with. ]
You must pick the one you like the very best and take it with you.
[ She is so prideful of her hair, so careful in its keeping. The ready willingness of the offer speaks louder of her heart than words could ever manage. ]
Then any time I am combing my hair in the mornings and come upon one which is shorter than the rest I shall remember there is part of me with you and I, too, shall feel a little less alone.
no subject
Not just because of what it means, to have someone who is as particular about their hair as Alexandrie clearly is (and he knows this, has watched her morning routine more than once now, and each time is astounded by the work and the care that goes into it), but because it reminds him of Sif, and the terribly cruel joke he'd played on her in regards to cutting her hair.
So he blinks a little, tilting his head and smiling sweetly after a moment, looking away from her face to take in the shape of her hair cascading around it. He reaches out and pulls his fingers carefully through a section of her hair, shaking his head a little bit. ]
An entire strand of curls? [ Loki asks, voice full of wonder. If Sif could see him now, she'd laugh in his face, he thinks, and he'd deserve it. ]
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It's an impetuous thing, perhaps, but somehow it does not feel like anything of the sort. It is simple: he had wanted something of her for his travels, she wishes it as much as he does, and it is the most intimate thing she can give. Far more than a handkerchief, a ribbon, even if she were to soak it in the summer rose of her perfume. Those things are hers, but they are not of her. This is.
It is for them when one of them is gone, and for them when they are together. She might find those missing strands in the mornings, as she'd said, but when he is here with his hands in her hair Loki will sometimes find them too; a reminder that one night she'd made a choice and it was him. ]
I give it freely.
[ Then a quiet chuckle. ]
Perhaps leave me a little at the top to pin.
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He separates one set of strands out, looping the hair around his index finger. ]
The last time I cut someone's hair it was to be unkind. [ He shakes his head a little; no one's ever given him a token like this, much less offered to allow him to choose it himself. ] Do we have scissors?
[ He has his daggers (one, at least, always, hidden away and summonable; the second is in his pack) if not, and they're definitely sharp enough for this business. ]
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What was it you used the last time, [ she asks, looking down for a moment with a smile at the soft shine of the hair he'd chosen that wraps his finger, the private little pleasure it gives her to think it already his, and then back to his eyes. ] When you were being unkind.
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A dagger, certainly.
[ He sets his other, unoccupied hand in his lap, summoning the dagger there and turning it by the handle so that the blade points towards his leg and doesn't point towards Alexandrie. ]
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[ Her eyes are luminous as she reaches for the dagger, lifts it with care, and deftly turns it in her hand to offer him the hilt. ]
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