[open] I could just hear them now, 'how could you let us down?'

[icasm]

WHO: Loki and anyone who is around
WHAT: Loki arrives and connects, reconnects, sleeps, causes problems, etc.
WHEN: last two weeks of Firstfall, first two weeks of
WHERE: The Gallows & Kirkwall
NOTES: nothing yet, will update as needed

∞ : an arrival, more or less : open to all : the Gallows infirmary

The return to Thedas is wholly unpleasant, as far as returns that don't involve time-skipping go.

Instead of returning as he'd left, or as he was, back in whatever reality his consciousness was split(‽) from only to spit him newly out of the Fade and smack dab on his ass, surrounded by demons, in the nearby wilds of the Planasene Forest, Loki reacquired consciousness dressed as he had been the first time the Loom fell and the TVA with it — including his TVA work suit, peacoat, and a copy of OB's "bestseller" The TVA Handbook in his pocket.

He did not arrive armed at all, and an attempt to summon his daggers, a sword, anything only had him frowning at his empty hands as volunteers from Riftwatch fan out in a half circle around him. Someone tosses him a short sword with a yell that he'll have to help defend the group; of course he will, what else would be expected? That he would just cry, curl in on himself, give up?

As appealing as that short list of options was? No.

The short sword will do, for now.

He falls asleep in the cart taking him back to the Gallows more than once. Is only woken up each time when someone grasps his shoulder and shakes roughly - no amount of calling his name or gentle treatment appears to make it through the heavy fog of intermittent narcoleptic catching up to massive amounts of sleep debt. He spends the next five days more or less asleep on a bed in a corner of the infirmary until he manages to remain awake through an entire meal... without anyone speaking to him directly the entire time.

For, you see, the moment anyone turns their back to him or isn't engaging him in conversation, he tends to doze off nearly immediately. But at least he is given clearance to leave the infirmary and take up room elsewhere in the Gallows, seeing as how he's apparently not actively ill or appears a health and safety risk to others; he's just, as he keeps telling whomever may ask, rather tired.



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[icasm]

He too wonders, and knows also that he has never deserved the breadth of how much she loves him. Not the first time, arriving half certain that he had died and learning different later, and definitely not now, run ragged and perhaps permanently exhausted beyond reasonable belief.

In the falling they had little choice. She knew and loved a version of him that knew and loved her back, removed from her arms too soon; he could not resist the siren's call of the possibility of being seen, known, loved fully by someone else.

Remaining that way? Continuing to love after disappearance and return? Those are choices.

Choices that Loki knows he will make, again and again, for the opportunity to remain in Alexandrie's orbit for as long as possible. As long as she'll allow it.

She says without saying that she never expected to see him again and his heart breaks for her into a million sharp little shards like volcanic glass.

"I would like that." Tea. To remain in her company. "We should not forget your rug in the garden."

He has not let go; his voice is quiet and hushed just like hers.

[coquettish_trees]

Sometimes, when the sun slants through the window in the morning and the edges of the light are sharp and defined as if the beam was something she could touch, there will be a mote. Something small, gone from invisible to high relief, hanging in the air and the light. And the simple fact of its existence and what it means about the world, about the light, steps Alexandrie gently out of time into a place where there is only her, and the mote, and the light. It is like seeing a secret the world keeps. It is like understanding that the world must keep many little secrets. It is like this.

Usually, someone will walk into the room and wake her. Or the mote will float out of the light. Here, Loki does not wish to move any more than she does, and no-one will be walking through: the held-breath hush that has replaced the bustle in the apartments behind her suggests that their little bubble of time has caught more than only them. It is this half-thought that roots her delicately back into the present, the tenderness laid so raw and bare on her face for him closing its petals slightly to one she might wear in front of other eyes.

"Tea, then." A little louder. Her smile is laced with mischief as she flicks her glance minutely— look behind me— bare moments before she turns her head... and the household, which had gathered surreptitiously to watch as if they had penny seats to an opera, launches suddenly back to their tasks. A young man strides back towards the kitchens with a maid in tow, presumably to ready the tea. The maid who'd tossed the rug dips a curtsey as she scurries past them into the garden to retrieve it. Their mistress, her eyes sparkling with something besides unshed tears again, cocks her head and smiles and gestures with a graceful open hand toward the door. He knows where they are going.

"Welcome home."

[icasm]

He follows the gesture of her gaze, takes in the servants in pause behind her — his lips quirk as they come to life again, but his eyes are back on Alexandrie’s face near immediately afterwards, fingers moving away from her face as she turns.

Welcome home, she says, and his breath catches in his throat as he crosses over the threshold after her, hands pressed into his pockets because he doesn't know what to do with them now. It is surreal, being in this space as it is being brought back to life.

It is surreal, knowing that this is once again home and that, once again, there is nowhere else in the known universe he could call the same.

"I hope your trip back from Orlais was uneventful?" Normal conversation attempts when he'd much rather fall asleep in her arms for several weeks straight.

[coquettish_trees]

"Wretched, I am afraid," is the reply, the light chirp of Alexandrie's tone at odds with the words as she settles her hand into the crook of Loki's arm, produced when his hands disappeared into his pockets. "It rained for three days, rendering holes in the road nearly invisible; Louis drove the carriage directly over one, Marie stabbed her finger nearly through with her needle and shrieked so fiercely that Louis pulled hard on the reins to stop the carriage so Jules could come and check on us, which caused one of the horses to slip, and there was such monstrous ruckus righting everything that no-one noticed the wheel that had taken the force of the initial jolt had come loose such that half an hour later we were treated to a repeat performance, and I do not actually want tea."

A pause. She has stilled in their slow progress towards the sitting room, refusing to walk any farther away from the stairs and the private rooms above.

"I do not want tea." Her gaze is dark and intent as she repeats the phrase that did not belong in her story any more than the hole had belonged in the road, her eyes as heavy on Loki as her hand is light. "I want to go where no-one is watching us and hold your face in my hands until I know you are real again."

[icasm]

There was something at the tip of Loki's tongue, an inquiry after Marie's overall well-being or perhaps a gentle poke to try and evaluate how her visit back home had been, if her father's health had improved at all, or perhaps taken a turn for the worst... but Alexandrie has stopped the two of them, not far from the stairs, and Loki's steps halt automatically just as his brain picks up the incongruence of I do not actually want tea.

He hadn't wanted to (hope, wish) presume that things could simply be picked up again as they'd been left behind before, considering any uncountable number of factors.

Loki closes his eyes beneath the weight of her gaze. Takes a breath of Alexandrie's perfume, and opens his eyes again. "I would also like that."

[coquettish_trees]

Her eyes are there waiting when his open; they are clear now, the heaviness gone, but just as intent. "Good," she says simply, and turns them up the stairs toward her still unfinished room. She can't remember what's been unpacked yet. It doesn't matter. As for the tea, the servants will figure it out. They are, all of them, clever.

There is something different about the Alexandrie at Loki's side as they ascend the stairs. She wears a kind of surety like a cloak. Moves like she has an anchor in her heart, instead of casting around always for someone outside herself to hold the ship of her body still. Loki is here. They are going upstairs. This time is theirs now. Her mind knows these things, and where a year ago her body would have still been unsure, needing the brute power of rage or passion to keep it clear for stillness enough to be sure as well, this year's Alexandrie is sailing like a swan at morning.

When they get to the room it will be in half disarray, but the bed will be made enough to be sat upon. There will be one chair with nothing yet piled upon it. There will always be the floor.

[icasm]

There's the bed, and the floor, and Loki debates the merits of resting his head in her lap a moment or forever, as the case may be; but he can't see her face easily that way, or kiss her mouth, and he feels a fool but he'll be this fool looking her in the eye.

At the very least that.

She moves with certainty and he moves as a kite, cutting its own way through the winds of change and the whims of the heart, still accounting for both. Without them, who would he even be? Trailing behind, a hand in hers, no resistance or hesitation. He picks her up by the waist after a moment's pause in the doorway of her bedroom, twirling them both around before settling in the lone bare-cushioned chair, Alexandrie perched in his lap. The smile he gives Alexandrie is something on the edge of marvel; he found a miracle once, in a woman who could easy make space for him in her heart, and here Loki is, gazing upon the selfsame miracle once more.

The sanctity of second chances.

It's the easiest thing in the world, to lift her hands to either side of his face. It's harder to keep his eyes open and on hers, but that is only a little bit because of physical exhaustion.

[coquettish_trees]

It had been trance-like, her surety. Much like Loki himself, belonging both to this world and some other one. He breaks it with his hands around her waist, with the easy way he whirls her through space, and Alexandrie finds herself making a little sound of surprise as the world moves around her and then rearranges itself around his smile. On the solid warmth of his closeness. Her hands on his face where he has drawn them.

Ten minutes ago, Alexandrie had a box in her mind packed with the things she'd chosen to know to be true. She'd packed it well, she'd had to, there was nowhere safe to take it apart and look at it. It had, until the moment he'd unexpectedly whirled her about, held Loki's reappearance nicely within it as well. This is, and was, and has ever been true about them: her husband, her lover. Nothing that is constructed in her can live long in their presence.

And so it is with wide guileless eyes that she now looks at him. Something inside her says safe. Her body tenses in reflexive response: not. But her fingers curl against his skin and he is here and he looks so tired. It calls to her own weariness; the gentle creeping quiet one she's been ignoring, born of being very watchful and being very alone. Safe it says again. This time her body says yes and with another little sound— of relief this time, of need— she relents and her lips are on his, her hands sliding back, fingers threading into his hair as she presses herself fiercely against the Loki who came back.

[icasm]

Loki isn't really giving himself the space to fully consider how tired he is - exhaustion has simply been a matter of fact since arriving in Thedas once more, and if he lets himself think about the why of it, if he takes the time to consider that he set aside his friends and everyone he loved in exchange for an existence of eternal and solitary watchfulness he might lose all manner of sense and start misbehaving terribly as a retaliation against his own decision making - but he sees it, mirrored in Alexandrie's body language in his arms, in those moments before she kisses him.

But once she does there's no room for much else. He kisses her back with all the energy of a lover returned from war to find that home, too, has changed in their absence but the affection for it has not changed.

His affection for Alexandrie has not changed.

Loki is aware he can be a fool, full stop. A fool in love is all the more dangerous, he suspects, and yet he will never choose its opposite.

How could he? Alexandrie is beautiful and vividly alive and present and loves him and while Loki can despise himself in tsunami waves that threaten to swallow him whole sometimes, he can never manage to hate himself enough to deny her anything, not really. Not enough to deny himself the chance to be loved, even knowing he will be changed by it. To love someone else in return.

So. Kisses. Demanding, healing, passionate kisses that he breaks for air with tiny effusive pecks all over her face, hoping to wrest a laugh from her. He suspects it's been too long since either of them have laughed and felt it exist as a palpable thing, like a heartbeat in one's chest.

[coquettish_trees]

It works. Alexandrie laughs, the bright sound of it interspersed with little shrieks of pure delight as she is overwhelmed entirely by the number and speed and erratic placement of all those little kisses. There is a brief counter-offensive, her own lips seeking whatever they can reach as he moves, none of it well-targeted: the side of his nose, his temple, an eyelid, and then the laughter is caught in the crucible of their mouths meeting again, transmuted to deeper wanton sounds and gasps of breath.

She clings to him, mindless and rejoicing, flinging away— as if a set of interfering petticoats— all the worry of the last year. The oscillating hope and despair that had moved slowly and perilously towards a sort of solemn acceptance, the lonely choice of stepping away from the life that was almost her own. This is only hers, only theirs, and neither world nor war may have it.