faderift | closed | your face has faded,

Entry tags:

closed | your face has faded,

WHO: Alexandrie, Loki, Thor
WHAT: she did a thing
WHEN: *waves hands around* a semi-present time that works out
WHERE: Hightown
NOTES: cw for discussion of death and grieving probably

Alexandrie De La Fontaine does not paint portraits. She does not paint people at all. She does not even paint their presence; her landscapes are all wild untouched nature, even when there are walls or fountains or houses to be seen from where she sits. Those are either represented as something wrought by nature rather than by mortal hands—a wall becomes brush, a fountain becomes a pond—or removed entirely.

But there had been something, in her conversation with Thor on the coast. About the loss of the trees on the coast near Val Royeaux, how those trees perhaps only existed in one place now: on the wall of the Asgard home in Marnas Pell. That someday, without that painting bearing witness, no-one would ever know they had existed at all. Like that grove, his mother—and Loki's—no longer existed on this earth. Surely the House had portraits that would remember her, but such things were far away, and thus no shield against the last memories of her that her sons carried. That Alexandrie carried.

The particular smile of the Lady of House Asgard was not difficult to recall, if only because it had been the only one that had ever been called into existence at the thought of her entanglement with Loki. It had not been only that, though, it had been because it was genuine in a world that did not allow for such things. Easy, warm, kind. Knowing—especially with the accompanied raise of her eyebrow—in a way that evoked the feeling of a shared conspiracy rather than anything being held out of reach, small enough to make it feel private to whomever it was cast on. Her sons had been so easy to see in her, or her in them. They'd seemed split out like the bands of colored light on the other side of life's prism from the glow of her.

Hesitantly, in secret, Alexandrie had sketched.

Starting the painting had been hard. Fraught in a way that it had never been before. You cannot hide, in your art. Or at least she could not. To her mind, a dishonest subject with a guarded artist was no art at all, likewise both permutations of honesty and dishonesty, subject and artist. An honest subject required an honest artist, and letting people see such feeling in Orlais that was not about flower, or tree, grass or brook was such a danger to both herself and to whomever she painted that she could not bear it.

But the sketch had remained in her secret portfolio, and the thought had ate at her, and then, one morning, she had mixed her paints to the colors she recalled so well from that sidewalk café just before everything had gone up in flames and put brush to canvas.

And then, for the weeks it took to finish, she had suddenly desired to do little else but paint, once she had found that brushstroke after brushstroke she was painting over the blood in her memory. Over the horrible surprise of the look on Frigga's face when the sword had done its brutal work on her. Like instead of creation it was some kind of restoration of what should have been.

And then, the day she finished, the dreams stopped.

She doesn't sign it. But when it is dry she takes it, draped in fabric easel and all, to the music room of the Asgard home in Kirkwall. Leaves a note pinned there to let the brothers know it is for them and then goes out, her hands clasped around a cup of tea, to sit in the garden.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

They don't keep a snake, she thinks as the pins she'd removed already are displaced by its movements, some of them falling to ping and clatter against the floor. Nor are there snakes moving freely about Kirkwall. Someone else's, perhaps.

Or simply someone.

The last thought becomes more likely as it raises its head and tickles her nose with a flicker of its tongue, drawing a rather unselfconscious girlish giggle from her, the mood she'd been in beginning to lift like the harbor's fog as the morning lengthens. She'll let it settle itself, even going so far as to raise an arm to provide a support for its passage, marveling at the dry smoothness of scale against her skin.

Bemusedly, Alexandrie wonders what she might do if Loki were to instead walk into the room now.

The disguise is spent, she knows who and what he is, else she is very comfortable around snakes. He settles his weight along her arm, then across her shoulders. He is long enough that he could stretch the length of her arm-span fingertip to fingertip, but curled as he is, he only drapes across her her bust.

He will settle like this, for a time, before he reverts.

It's more a rather informed guess—hope, really—than an actual knowing, the distinction betrayed in the still rather hesitant way she pets the scales of its head once it has settled in. The weight of the creature is rather considerable, but as comforting as any resting weight that lives. It would be moreso if she were not sitting up, and so, even though her hair is only half let down, Alexandrie slowly stands from her seat at the vanity and makes her careful way to fold back the covers and sit on the bed, lift her feet and tuck them under while she steals his pillows so she can lean back into the little nest she makes of it all.

She settles i to the soft sheets and sinks into the mattress and Loki is torn. While her hesitance is amusing, he cannot entirely enjoy the creature comforts here in shit shape. Snakes cannot sigh or else he mightve as he moved off her amrs and into the space beneath the covers.

He had been touching her once when he shifted gender but shifting species is a far more disturbing state of affairs. He will not test her tolerance that far--and besides, changing back this way gives him the delightful opportunity to spontaneously crawl up the length of her legs and settle, crossed arms, over her stomach to stare up at her.

He is still fully dressed but alas, such is fate.

She watches with interest after the snake as it disappears beneath the blankets with a last draw of the tip of its tail against her thigh, its shape growing at the foot of the bed until it is one she recognizes, the mattress dipping slightly on one side then the other, the drag of his body up her legs as he makes his way back up and out from under the covers to fold his arms over her.

"Bonsoir, mon beau serpent," Alexandrie murmurs fondly, reaching to smooth his hair where the bedding had mussed it.

Loki's weight in this form is as welcome as the snake's had been. More, because it is a familiar one. It is difficult to look at him for overlong, though, or to meet his eyes at all, now that they are ones she knows. She breathes in through her nose, and looks at his hands instead. Reaches to set a fold in his sleeve straight, then carefully, hesitantly asks "did... you see it?"

"It shocked me into a stupor, I'm afraid," Lokie admits and his tone is caught in the attempt at coyness, awkward because it is anything but. He has no trouble staring at her without reservation even as she turns her gaze away.

He is silent a time as he contemplates her. She is nervous, that much he can guess. It was a bold gift.

"I didn't expect to see her smile again."

"And did you?" It is asked after a silence of her own, her voice quieter even than it had been before. She knows well how much Loki had loved his mother, how close she may have passed to some unforgivable trespass on land that wasn't hers to walk on with what she had done, if she had done it poorly. Perhaps having done it at all. As easily as she attempts to sit, her muscles are tense enough where he lies on them that it is a facade eminently able to be seen through.

She moves to sit and, because he is a contrary creature Loki does not make it easy for her. He is a not insubstantial dead weight and he rests across her legs and thighs like a trap. His unreadable expression falters just so, then, and some of his delight filters through. Her tension now is almost as amusing as her startle earlier--and both of them persist in being funny because he knows that her fears are unfounded.

"I did," he relents, at least verbally, and rests his head on his hands, smug as she is trapped beneath his weight.

She does look at him then, with some alacrity, as she notes the change in his voice. And then shortly thereafter the bits of smug delight near his eyes, his mouth. So he was pleased.

"Bête." Alexandrie accuses, her crossness more relief than anything else, a smile twitching at the corners of her lips as she raises a hand to flick him gently in the nose. "You are awful to me, and I am resolved to escape you once and for all." Upon saying so, she immediately begins an ill-fated but earnest attempt to struggle out from under him.

It is, after all, less fun if she doesn't really try.

"There is no escape, my dear," Loki warns her as she wriggles herself mostly free from his weight. Her thrashing is in good humor and, as such, so is the way he sets his hands on her sides and begins danging his fingers against her waist. He is merciless and, as he tickles, twists an arm around her back to try and snare her.

"You are stuck with me until we perish."

It is said with utmost fondness and, in rare form, Loki's expression is open and all but brimming with adoration. His smile, however, is as wicked as it has ever been.

Her thrashing was in good humor. Now it is the attempt of a writhing animal to escape its tormentor, accompanied by shrieks of laughter that are half glee and half terror as she first tries to pull Loki's hands from her—the which she can only manage one at a time using both of hers, so it is entirely fruitless—and then after he manages to increase his grip she lays hands on one of the pillows beneath her and attempts to push his face away with it.

“Ah, Non! Aidez moi, Fifi, je suis—" another gale of laughter, such that her continued calling for help is punctuated by repeated gasps for breath, "je suis en train d'être assassiné!"

"Ah and a gruesome end it shall be," Loki says as he leans forward and presses a kiss against her lower ribs. His fingers slow, but they do not cease, not yet.

"Do you surrender, my dear? Will you give up this attempt to flee?"

"Non!"

Despite the fervency of Alexandrie's denial (we do not negotiate with terrorists)—the which she used the entirety of her air for—her struggles are getting considerably weaker, her laughter becoming largely soundless save for brief hiccups. She throws an arm across her face in an attempt to hide the redness of it, the tracks where the intensity of her forced mirth actually caused her to shed tears.

"Ah! A pity," Loki laments. "My love shall perish here, for I cannot allow her to leave."

His fingers still on her sides, only twitching to inspire short bursts of laughter, but he allows her to calm, trapped as she is. His grin is insufferably smug and only passingly sorrowful. In his lament he sighs and turns his eyes toward the sky before letting his head drop against her breast.

She sighs also, in between the huffs of mirth he insists on teasing from her, and intones laboriously, "Au moins je meurs dans tes bras; parce que même si tu es un méchant, je t'aime."

And then, as dramatically as she can, Alexandrie passes from this earth.

It's ruined a moment later when he makes her laugh again despite herself, and she gives up her play-acting to drape her arms across his shoulders.

Loki chuckles then, once their pantomime is done, and the whole of the sound resounds against his chest and thus against her legs. After a moment or two he smooths his hands flat against her and leans up just so.

"It is a grand gift."

The happiness in the look she gives him is nearly painfully genuine, as is the soft pleased smile beneath it. None of it is something that the Alexandrie of a mere half year ago would ever have worn. Would ever have considered letting herself wear. Nor would that Alexandrie have ever made such a gift.

She wriggles the opposite way, then. Closer, rather than farther, until she can reach to kiss his forehead.

"I am glad to hear so."

"I suspect you knew it would be," Loki teases, though that thread of genuine appreciation has not quite faded from him.

"It is only one of two, now, and the other is in Tevinter."

She hadn't known. Not really. Somehow, the thought that Frigga almost certainly had portraiture done of her elsewhere—it would be surpassingly strange, else—had not figured strongly in her quest to provide it. Was that selfish of her?

It is suddenly striking to be like this, her robe rucked up from her movement and leaving her bare against him to well above her knees, despite the cover the blankets provide. How like how it had been in the tents of the Tevene encampment at the Tourney, Loki far more clothed than she. Now? Now her fingers are almost shy as they raise to the line of his jaw.

"Would it be unforgivably honest of me to admit I knew nothing?" Alexandrie replies, looking as guardedly vulnerable as she ever has.

"My dear, I daresay it..." Loki starts his head tilting just so to fit with the rise of her fingers against his jaw. He is settled comfortably above her and his look of appreciation shifts, just so, into something a bit more sharp and attentive.

The mood has changed. How wondrous.

"...I could be persuaded to forgive you of anything."

Alexandrie's eyes are lively and dancing with mischief as she opens her mouth to say something to the order of 'a pity I have never done anything in my life to need such forgiveness', but he is looking at her in that incisive considering way he has that makes her feel like a curiosity to be solved. And his skin is warm under her fingers and his eyes are so very green.

And so instead her gaze shifts as well, becomes intent as she replies quietly, "Say it again."

His brows arch as she makes her request and, for a moment, he is tempted to oblige her outright...but Loki is nothing if not mercurial and, abruptly, he is struck with a bout of amnesia.

"Why whatever do you mean?"

She knows he could as easily know what she's asked for as not. Loki is as slippery as the serpent he had just been in any form, and it pleases him to be so every bit as much as it pleases Alexandrie to catch him when she can. She has luck, sometimes, with the sort of sudden sincerity she speaks with now as she shifts to rest more snugly beneath him.

"Say I shall never escape you. That it will remain so, until we have run out of breath."

Foolishness that belongs in tales, perhaps, but even so.

"Oh you wish me to repeat facts? Such a curious request...but who am I to deny my captive."

Loki's grin is wicked and, with this shift in their game he can see no reason to keep that teasing from his tone. He shifts until he can look down at her face from scant inches away.

"You are mine, my dear," he says and lets his tone stray into the commanding. "You have lingered too long in my den and now I shall keep you. Forever, I think, or at the very least until one or both of us perishes."

That this is precisely what she desired to hear would be obvious even without the sudden pull of her hand at his shoulder, at the back of his neck. Without the grasping of her fingers for purchase in the cloth of his robes, in his hair, the lift of her head to remove the distance between them, her nose rubbing against the side of his.

"Yes," Alexandrie replies, half exhalation. And then very innocently, "But it is a mutual captivity, for you have let me wrap you in my web and now I shall keep you forever as well." Illustratively, she wraps both arms and legs around him with a quiet pleased chuckle.

Edited 2018-11-22 20:31 (UTC)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

closed | your face has faded,

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject