A fashionable walk.

[hwaaaitsme]

WHO: Character(s)
WHAT: Loki swans about and harasses his ex-girlfriend.
WHEN: Current.
WHERE: Hightown.
NOTES: Loki gonna be Loki.

Loki was not, in any sense, the sort of person who generally asked permission to do things. Whether he believed he was permitted to do them or not was irrelevant--frankly it was usually easier to ask for forgiveness. So, on this fine Bloomingtide day, when he found himself unable to tolerate the renovations to his estate any longer, he invited himself to Gwenaëlle's home and strode in like he owned the place.

He all sashayed into her drawing room, or whatever one called the room just past the foyer in the South, and sent a servant to both announce him and summon Gwenaëlle. He draped himself across one of her sofas, casually as he pleased, and snatched a book from the table to occupy him as the servants scurried forth. He assumed she was in and, honestly, even if she wasn't, this house was far quieter and easier to think in.

He would be staying a while, regardless of her presence, but the promise of it was preferable to being all alone.

Comments

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle had not been expecting company.

This is apparent in how long it takes her to appear, and how she appears when she does—not merely unusually dressed down for a woman who has never seemed conversant with the concept of dressing down, but this will undoubtedly be the first time Loki has ever seen her wearing trousers. The clothes are as fine as ever, but there is a practicality to them, lending themselves to motion and comfort as her tight corsets and heavy skirts do not; her hair has been tightly braided back from her face, and the flush of exertion rises on her high cheekbones.

“I have to be honest,” she says, leaning in the doorway and taking him in, catlike in his ability to decide that anywhere he wants to lie is somewhere for him to do so (a thing they've always had in common), “I didn't think to see you again.”

Under the very public circumstances of her recent disgrace. Then again, she hadn't expected the Duke to decide she's still his favourite granddaughter, so perhaps the men in her life are all full of surprises, yet.

[hwaaaitsme]

Loki looks up from his book, or rather the book he is borrowing, and cocks a brow at Gwenaëlle. Her outfit does not go without note--he clearly looks her up and down--but he says nothing about the matter as he drapes the open novel face-down against his chest.

"I would say I'm hurt by that sentiment, but I'm not really known for reliability," Loki replies drolly. "Or predictability...so I suppose it's a fair assumption."

He shifts his arms and settles both behind his head, all the world looking like a man reclining in his own home rather than an uninvited guest in someone else's.

"But here I am, and isn't that a treat?"

[elegiaque]

“Maybe,” she allows, which is still warmer than the last words she exchanged with him not far from here, when they were in his own home. She leaves the door open behind her, but she does come further into the room, tugging free the gloves she'd been wearing—a vanity she perhaps shouldn't indulge, and almost certainly doesn't when her instructor is present, disliking the new calluses of wielding something sharper than a pen.

Creams and gloves and fussing and, yet, she doesn't flinch when she holds the knife, not any more.

“Is Kirkwall truly boring you so much already?”

Her hip rests against the arm of the sofa, nearest his feet and not in easy reach of his hands.

[hwaaaitsme]

"It is certainly no Orlais," Loki replies drolly and drums his fingers along his arm. "I had expected somewhat more...personality in this location, it is one of the larger cities after all, and yet it is as dull as a countryside."

He shrugs with one shoulder as he regards her. He considers picking up the book again but she is hovering nearby and paying him her full attention. He truly enjoys both of those things and has no current desire to dissuade her from either.

"It doesn't help that the craftsmen here are so dreadfully slow. The renovations to our estate are only now completing and I can't think for the sound of hammering."

[elegiaque]

A matter of opinion, she thinks, but then: Kirkwall hardly seems the sort of place suited to Loki's personality. His opinion is much less a surprise than finding him here in her sitting room.

“Marchers,” she says, blandly. What can you do.

“The Duke's taken over this household,” after a moment, glancing around the room—little has changed around her, and yet, so much is different now. It's unsettling, sometimes, even as the shock dulls. She had set herself in motion and stayed that way in response, and that's served her well; when she slows, she doesn't quite know what to do with any of it. “And I imagine he'd find you less charming than I do. Let me change. I haven't been out in Hightown in an age.”

It isn't that she thinks people would be less inclined to whisper about her passing in his company—more, probably, because look at him. A bloody great Tevene madman. However: look at him. For all his foppish affect, the man is a brick house and a more than adequate mage—they might whisper, but she suspects few will try anything.

(Were she alone—then it might be different. Then she might have to admit out loud why she's preferred to keep to her house, her carriage, the Gallows.)

[hwaaaitsme]

"By all means," Loki acquiesced and freed a hand to gesture at the door. He made no move to rise. "Don your most comely apparel and let me whisk you away to an afternoon in the countryside...or a reasonable facsimile thereof."

Once his statement is complete, Loki lifts the book on his chest and flips through a few pages. It hadn't held his interest very effectively, but it hadn't really needed to. He shuts it and tosses it aside on a nearby chair as he rights himself.

"Perhaps we might even find something interesting to do in Kirkwall, should we be very fortunate."

[elegiaque]

“I wouldn't call it out of the question.”

Ideally, even, something that doesn't end with anyone under arrest. She points at him— “Don't do anything I have to explain to anyone while I'm gone. I won't be long.”

In her wake, a maidservant comes with offerings of tea or wine while he waits, and Gwenaëlle does not linger upstairs too long—perhaps not as long as she'd like, to be more satisfied with her own presentation in a first outing, but leaving Loki unattended in the house seems...

At best, unwise.

The dress she returns in is light enough for the changing weather, and if the rains come there will be no shortage of places to wait them out. Stockings tied, shoes nothing that water will badly stain, and hair loosened, only pinned back lightly; far more acceptably ladylike, that illusion of the ingenue she does such a good impersonation of.

“And what has been occupying your time, so far?” picking up easily where she'd left.

[hwaaaitsme]

Gwenaëlle returns after a brief absence, briefer than he had expected if he were being honest, and spares him having to wave off her servants. He has done quite enough of that in his own home, of late, and it is truly exhausting. She is clad in an outfit of sylph and floral accents, respectable by most standards and nearly opulent against the normal Kirkwall affairs.

He regards her light clothing a moment and, with a sigh and a flick of his wrist, alters his own to something a bit less...contrasting. His black silks and green accents shift to something a bit more beige and brown, a little subtler is the cut of his robes, but the gold remains ever-present. She had never been fond of his magic before, he can't imagine she is now, so he doesn't give her much time to reprimand his flagrant abuse of power. It is only an illusion but, frankly, he cannot be bothered to explain that much.

"Minding renovations and searching for what belongings were lost or perished when they were moved to this estate." He shrugs as he steps alongside her and motions for the door. "All terribly boring and each requiring my presence at every step I fear."

He offers her his arm out of habit.

[elegiaque]

Magic unsettles her far less than it once did; no objections die unspoken because none were forthcoming, a shifting ease from many sources. One might imagine it to have something to do with the anchor-shard she bears (the powers in it that she wields), but a wiser observer might think to themselves: she wears her hair not unlike the Lady Morrigan, these days. And that, perhaps, would speak to it.

Not irrelevant, either, that she had warmed Loki's bed and not his heart—that she thought he was probably approximately trustworthy in the five minutes after orgasm, and other than that, to be treated warily, a live serpent coiled under her hands. Considering her own proclivities, their entanglement had been more reason to beware him than not; Gwenaëlle was never unaware of her tendency to self-destruction. What this is now, of course, is harder to parse...and somehow easier to navigate, a little, without the pressing distraction of his tendency to press her to things.

She thinks she sees him a little clearer, now she looks him more often in the eye instead of admiring the line of his shoulders. Not that they aren't lovely; she lets him have her hand in his elbow, and if they're five different kinds of a scandal walking sedately through Hightown, at least they make a pretty pair.

“I saw your brother, at least, has successfully attached himself to the Inquisition. They're putting you to work, as well?” Or...?