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WHO: Colin + YOU
WHAT: Returning from the jungle
WHEN: Current
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES:

I. The Return

All Colin really wants at the moment is to flop down into his bed. Not because he's particularly tired, at the moment, but because he wants to be reassured that it still feels as good as he remembers. He drifts among the crowd at the docks, reunions happening all around as people greet their friends, but manages to stick closely to Athessa and limit his greetings to people he's close to. Not tired, but overwhelmed. There's an aching hollowness to him, and the pressing crowd only increases his discomfort.

II. Home

It is not Colin's presence anywhere in the Gallows that might be noted now, but his absence from it. His typical silence on the crystals and the journals now applies to his own life. For several days after returning, for as long as he can get away with claiming to be ill, he is closed up in his apartment in Hightown. If you want to speak with him, make him stop hiding, or get him to cook anything for you, you'll have to meet him here.

III. Wildcard

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His face breaks into a smile and he goes straight into her arms, holding her tightly. He's needed these arms; though he had numerous others, her arms matter and cannot be substituted.

"I missed you."

She shifts to her toes so she can gain the height that will let her rest her chin atop his shoulder, hold him such that Colin can rest his head against hers with greater ease should he wish to.

"Tu m'as manqué aussi, mon chou," Alexandrie murmurs in return, favouring the smooth rounder sounds of her native tongue as she does in those moments in which she wishes the intimacy of sounding most like herself. It hardly matters if understanding comes from the words; if it does not, it will come from the soft surety of her hold.

They will stay that way until he begins to release her; she will draw back when he does.

The hug lasts a long time, but eventually, enough is enough. He pulls back, face shining with a smile the like of which he has neither made nor felt since before the eluvian mission began.

"I have to greet my other friend here now. Come on."

He takes her hand and leads her to the kitchen, where he sighs. "Hello, other friend. I might not cook in you straight away, but it will be soon."

Indulgent bemusement breaks into the light silvery fall of laughter at finding out the identity of this 'other friend', and Alexandrie squeezes his hand affectionately.

"There is a third friend waiting for you if you should like to become reacquainted," she says, voice laden with promise, "I had Marie draw you a bath, which I believe she has timed impeccably such that it will have finished cooling from 'scalding' to 'perfect' at this very moment."

Colin's eyes widen, his lips part, and he draws Lexie back into his arms in thanks.

"I love you so much," he says quietly. "Though maybe it's your fault I've gotten so used to these luxuries. I missed them so much while we were in that jungle."

He releases her with a wide smile. "I will be back. But it would be ungrateful not to take advantage of Marie's hard work while the temperature is perfect."

"'Be back?'" Alexandrie echoes as a query, brows lofting as if to say 'what on earth has that to do with me?'

"It is one of the world's finer things to need only be accountable for soaking and gossiping whilst someone else picks the leaves out of your hair," she effects the plucking movement, despite there not truly being leaves there, and smiles impishly. "Unless you are truly committed to twisting around in an effort to wash the jungle from your own back, in which case I shall relinquish the opportunity to spoil you."

She sighs as if that would be a terrible burden indeed, and doesn't look as if she'd be bothered in the slightest if he preferred to be alone.

Colin's mouth opens, he looks at once uncomfortable and kind of gleeful. It eventually forms as a shy grin.

"I've never been bathed by anyone," he says. "Well. Not since I learned to bathe myself. It does present the advantage of not being away from you."

The quizzical look on Alexandrie’s face makes it obvious that having never been bathed by anyone is an entirely foreign concept to her—and then she looks delighted and begins playfully herding him toward the bath like a mother hen fluttering over a wayward chick. (One careful to always leave enough physical room for it to turn and say ‘no’.)

“Tell me you have at least been taking advantage of the oils I left!” she exclaims in mock horror, rather hoping he hasn’t, as that means she can fuss harder.

"Um, I haven't wanted to use them up," he admits sheepishly, "so I've only used them once or twice."

The look she gives him, or gives the back of his head at least, as she herds him into the room where the tub is steaming gently as promised is something akin to the look he might give someone in a bakery who said ‘I haven’t wanted to use up the flour, so I mostly bake using stones’. Really Colin, is it even a bath then?

“Then today shall be the third,” Alexandrie states in a tone that brooks no disagreement. “Are you injured at all, such that you need help undressing?”

"Fortunately no," Colin reports, starting to disrobe. He was able to bathe intermittently in the jungle, but that wasn't always very useful when he had only one set of clothes. It was easier on the ship. He already knew how to live aboard a ship, how to wash his clothes, how to find what he needed, but it was still only one set of clothes, and you don't do a great job of washing when you're trying to hurry it up so you're not half-naked in front of everyone all the time. At any rate, shedding these clothes is something he's wanted to do for a while. For all he cares, they can burn.

"Finally got used to being naked in front of other people," he informs her as he steps into the bath and sinks in. The sound he makes at the touch of the hot water, at the feeling of it closing about him as deep as his frame will allow, is one of pure bliss.

The temptation to have them burned is, in fact, shared by Alexandrie, and is only stayed because she knows how Colin dislikes things going to waste. They will, however, be very very washed. She hums in self-satisfaction to hear his obvious enjoyment and pulls a plushly cushioned stool to the head of the tub to seat herself on before reaching to loose his hair and set to the task of detangling it with nimble fingers.

“Necessity is an effective tutor,” she agrees, before changing her tone to one of playful suggestion “Unless the lesson was come by more... interestingly?”

"No," Colin sighs, relaxing at her treatment of his hair. "No sex. Though I made a new just-friend? Sonia Barra, she was one of the other people who was captured. We looked out for each other."

Meaning he looked out for her and doesn't want to say it.

A affectedly sympathetic cluck for 'no sex', although that line of inquiry is abandoned quickly enough with a delighted exclamation.

"Lady Barra! A delightful woman. I—" Ah. Captured. More softly then, "This was her first mission outside Kirkwall, no? That is... I am glad you were with her."

"She's going to teach me how to swim." A sigh as he relaxes further into the water. "It was a hard month and a half, so having her, having Athessa, it meant everything. I haven't really had time to process the kidnapping, somehow all I could think of was how it was a year since..."

She stays quiet, but doesn't pause in her work. The knots and snarls and places where the gentle wave of his hair grabs at itself are found and put to rights one by one until the run of her fingers through it catches nothing.

And then she is running her fingers through it slowly just to do so.

It is a waiting quiet.

There's a long sigh. He doesn't have to name the ghost.

"I finally got Byerly to tell me why he's so angry with me. More for the sake of closure than anything."

Alexandrie hums her inquiry as she bends to retrieve a cup to dip into the water beside Colin and pour it carefully over his head, her other hand set just above his forehead to keep it from cascading down his face.

"He said he would never forgive anyone who hurt me. Including me. And that's all right, I think. At least I got an explanation, and I feel like I've said goodbye."

The gesture is repeated—warm water sluicing down hair, across shoulders—and once more again before she trades the cup for a bar of fragrant soap to lather in her hands and massage across his scalp.

“I should call him hypocrite for hurting you,” she says softly, “but I do not think Byerly forgives himself anything either.”

"I agree," he sighs, eyes sliding shut as the warm water runs through his hair. "I don't want him to feel guilty. I don't want anyone's guilt or blame on anyone. I wish I could just...reach out, put my hand on the knot, and untangle the hurt that makes people do things that hurt themselves and others. Make it so we could all deal with each other honestly and keep the friendships we all clearly want to keep. He didn't want to lose a friend, either. I'm not going to make that more painful for him. I'm always too prepared to let people go; I may as well use that here."

“Ah, mon chou,” she sighs as well, idly patterning circles with her hands as she works the soap through his hair. “Honesty can be as sharp a knife as any other.

“And sometimes it hurts as much to keep as it does to let go.”

"For him, or for me?"

For me.

“For all.” She wipes her hands on a cloth, takes up the cup again to wash the bubbles away.

"I can't try to keep people who don't want to keep me," he murmurs. "Or who...can't."

There's silence as she rinses the soap from his hair.

"Why did you forgive me?"

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cw: SI

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