[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.



[ Individual & localized starters in comments, feel free to wildcard to your ♥ content | I will match your format ]

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[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.