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]

“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.