open | love in the time of grippe

[coquettish_trees]

WHO: Alexandrie Nightingale and anyone who wants to be cosseted
WHAT: She's here to visit you, illness-ridden friends.
WHEN: Grippe Season
WHERE: Quarantine Central (and also at home because someone's dodging being dragged in there.)
NOTES: will match prose or brackets ♥

It's absolutely wretched here, but Alexandrie is making rounds of the sickbeds anyway dressed in simple expendable skirts (she's not burning anything nice thankyouverymuch), her hair woven into a casual halo of braids. For whatever reason—Maferath's own luck, perhaps—despite her visits to help care for those affected by the outbreak, she hasn't taken ill herself and doesn't look like to.

And so here she is, murmuring some sort of sympathetic nothing, resting the back of her bare hand on a forehead or a cheek and replacing the towels that help to lower fever with cooler ones.

Comments

[coquettish_trees]

Loki’s snappish reply buys him little more than an upward twitch of her eyebrows—he is currently a miserable wretch and she will take pity on him. Not enough pity to allow him an escape from drinking the tea, however. In fact, Alexandrie will, with patient solicitousness, lift the pot from the tray and refill the cup before settling herself beside him on the edge of the mattress.

“Then I shall bring my work in here, tell Coleus that we are not to be disturbed for the remainder of the day, and keep watch myself,” she says, reaching in an attempt to smooth hair she cannot see back from his forehead. The guess is wrong; her fingertips find only skin there, and she emits a puff of amused air through her nose. “Will that suffice?”

[hwaaaitsme]

She reaches through the sufrace of the illusion, brushing her fingers across his brow, and his amusement at her mild huff is enough to get something close to smiling out of him. He considers her suggestion and forces himself to drink another cup full of that dreadful tea.

"Well, I cannot imagine anyone else I would trust to the task," Loki tells her, quietly, and the edges of his spell start to fray at his low volume. It isn't hard to make out the stuffy nose when he fails to project.


"And I have never chased a gorgeous woman from my bedroom when she wishes to spend the day here."

[coquettish_trees]

She bats her eyelashes coyly at him despite the ponderous clogged sound of his undisguised voice and the brightness in his eyes that had seemed lively revealed as distant and feverish.

He looks dreadful.

“Alas that it shall not be more ardently spent,” Alexandrie sighs in affected mourning, disguising her worry by leaning to press a quick kiss to his hair before getting up to make the arrangements she had suggested.

Coleus naturally having made himself convenient just outside means it is easily done.

On her return, she mercilessly refills the hated tea again—it’s fairly clear that ‘finish the tea’ means pot rather than cup—before setting to feeling out and removing the pins in her hair. It will take a bit longer than usual, as most of her attention is on making sure her resourceful husband doesn’t disappear the tea through other means than drinking it.

[hwaaaitsme]

Loki let his illusion fall, as he said he would, and felt the strain of it immediately. He was truly disgusting, he felt, sweaty and pale, with damp hair that clung to him and both a redness and sallow, waxy complexion scattered over his face. She poured him more of that awful tea and he regarded it balefully for a time.

Rather than choke down another cup so quickly, he watched as she pulled the pins from her hair and let the carefully coiffed copper tumble down her shoulders.

That she kept a very firm, unbreaking eye on him while she did was...enough to have a small, slightly smug and slightly mischievous smirk spread across his face.

"Do I look so awful you must stare?" He asked sounding every bit as innocent as he had ever attempted to. Gods but he was under her spell, wasn't he? It hadn't even occurred to him to vanish the tea, not after she'd poured it for him. It has clearly occurred to her, though, and this game was better than anything he'd been doing before.

[coquettish_trees]

"Quite the opposite," Alexandrie replies, pulling her loosed hair forward over her shoulder and shifting her efforts from pins to the release of the myriad of tiny buttons that close the back of her gown, "I am utterly captivated." A lie—he does look awful enough to make her stare—but only half of one, for she loves him. It made him beautiful when he looked like he'd been dragged in the road all the way from the Tevinter border, and it makes him beautiful now. More so, thanks to the self-satisfied little smirk she'd managed to summon through the dour mien he'd been wearing when she'd arrived.

"...And I have always been so," she appends softly, her hands pausing, the gentle surety of her adoration bared in her gaze for a long moment before she returns to the task.

If she's going to be staying in, she may as well be comfortable.

[hwaaaitsme]

It is a tender, heartfelt moment that Loki truly savors. Truly. Her open adoration has never once ceased to amaze him (though it is often paired with confusion, he has not indulged that in quite some time) and he watches until she returns to the task of undoing buttons down the length of her spine.

"May I?" He prompts and gestures to her efforts.

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie’s thought process before she acquiesces is much longer than what customarily greets Loki’s offers to disrobe her. (Although it is difficult to be any shorter than immediacy.) Perhaps it’s absurd to think of slipping free a handful of buttons as taxing in the slightest, but she currently has more than half a mind to cocoon her husband in bedding such that he won’t be able to do anything but rest and then cosset him until even he at his most self-indulgent is weary of her solicitousness.

Eventually her thoughts give way to a grateful look, however, and a shift so that the buttons are within Loki’s easy reach. She can do the rest once she is prepared to settle herself beside him.

[hwaaaitsme]

Loki thought, for just a moment, that the game was up...but his Alexandrie, his trusting, lovely wife turned her back and presented the buttons that lined her dress. Loki promptly waved the contents of his teacup away and set it aside, empty, on the saucer. His free hands met and began undoing the buttons on her lovely dress...though he was not much faster, taking time as he did to smooth fingers against her spine.

[coquettish_trees]

The tick of the cup on the saucer she had expected; after all, his hands were to be otherwise occupied.

What she was not expecting, when she turned her head to look over her shoulder to chide Loki coquettishly for attempting to make her feverish with desire since he had not managed to make her feverish with illness, was to find it empty. The coy look blossoms immediately into outraged amusement, Alexandrie letting her mouth drop open in exaggerated shock before she exclaims "Scélérat! Ah, how my faith is rewarded!"

[hwaaaitsme]

Loki contrived to look hurt by her accusation, by the wounding cruelty of the name she leveled at him, but it was a thin veneer. He pressed a hand to his chest whilst the other remained dedicated to his task. It would be complete, soon enough.

"By a doting husband?" He asked, in confused offense. "You wound me, my love, with such dreadful names. How will I ever recover from this sickness that plagues me so?"

[coquettish_trees]

Finally free of the buttons, Alexandrie rises and turns to loft her brows at her stricken beloved, a soft petulant pout on her lips as she escapes the gown aided by a bit of a wiggle. It’s swiftly followed by numerous petticoats, and all are pushed aside with a foot while she refills the cup (again) with the last of the pot.

“Through the dutiful consumption of the tea so lovingly provided by your doting wife, I should think.” She begins to loosen the corset beneath with practiced fingers.

This is rethought, for the sake of their little game, and she presents her back to Loki again for his aid—although this time she turns her head just enough that she can keep an eye on him in her periphery.

[hwaaaitsme]

Loki gives her a sly and plaintive look, as though her accusation has cut him to his core, and lowers the cup he had lifted to his lips. He hadn't even entertained the notion of drinking it down, but the sigh he let out was clearly meant to make it seem otherwise.

The cup was set aside and, in response to her challenge, he did not put it beyond her view but rather on the side she'd gazed back over.

"And now I am maligned so, accusations in my sweet wife's voice, and for what reason I ask?"

His fingers find the lines of her lacing and he works the knot from the center as he loosens the cords. He is deft but he takes his time, just waiting for when she will turn her head aside or blink that he might cast a glamour and dispose of that dreadful beverage.

[coquettish_trees]

“It is only because she is made near frantic, can hardly bear the terrible worry that consumes her every waking moment as long as the hands that hold her heart tremble with fever.”

And she feigns the opening she thinks he may be watching for, lowering her eyelids with a pained breath through her nose such that she barely maintains vision.

[hwaaaitsme]

She baits him and, it only to frustrate her efforts, Loki ignores the teacup at his side. He reaches, instead, to smooth a hand against the curve of her chin. The other rests against her lower back, bracing her as he offers her a soft smile.

"Ah, the care and tenderness of my dearest love. How much stronger I feel, already."

He pushes up to brush a kiss against her cheek and, quite clumsily, knocks the teacup and saucer askew as he does so.

[coquettish_trees]

She tilts her chin into his hand with a small smile of her own, and for a short but critical moment Alexandrie does indeed close her eyes.

They snap open again in surprise as the cup and saucer clatter, spilling the tea across the table where it runs in little rivulets onto the floor; her head turns toward it on instinct, and his lips land somewhere near her nose.

Her eyes flick to the liquid, back to Loki, and for a moment her expression looks like a building storm. Then it breaks open into indulgent delight, and she turns more fully to allow her to kiss his forehead.

“If you are well enough to play tricks upon me,” she murmurs against the damp heat there, “then you are well enough that I shall allow you to avoid my summoning a replacement pot.” She finishes the unlacing on her own and abandons the corset in the same pile as the rest, free in only the fine cloth of her chemise to wriggle herself back against the pillows and lift her arm to make room for Loki to use her as one.

“For now,” she adds, lest he think he has won entirely.