His expression shifts a little. Softens. Some outward feeling being projected rather than the inward scramble—that he doesn't want to upset her, not that it's unreasonable to be upset about someone you care for getting hurt. And not that Derrica isn't made of sterner stuff than that, which is why he will answer the question.
"Richard's a really good healer," he says, trace humour there, but more seriously, "There's been fights. A couple of near misses. One time didn't miss, but Richard—"
Hm.
"Well, I nearly died, I sort of did, a bit, and he saved me before it took properly. But we all together saved a kingdom, chasing off the demon that'd attached herself to the royal family there. So it all sort of shakes out," and he squeezes her hand. Please don't be worried.
Even knowing that it's a near-useless exercise, that she'll never be able to affect anything about how he moves through his own world, the anxiety about his well-being is inextricable. She still worries for Holden, wherever he is, so far beyond her reach.
When she extricates one hand from his grasp, it's only to touch his chest. Set her palm where she had seen him skim his own fingers over moments before.
"Very heroic," is sincere, even if the wrinkle of concern hasn't left her face. "Was that where you were, before you woke up? That kingdom?"
said to reassure. It's an oddly vivid memory, of all of them (the wet thunk of a sharply-spined tail sinking directly into his heart, the odd weightlessness after), but it isn't how he woke up. Loxley lifts his hand to chase hers, flat overtop of her knuckles. He is warm, his heart is beating, no scar tissue to feel.
This will be the second time he's done this in a dream. There's no telltale scarring from the knife sunk into his side, either.
"We moved on," he says. "Last I remember, we were underground. On a journey."
Her hand remains, set over his heart. Held under his hand.
"Can you tell me to where?"
Is it something that even can be explained? Is it something Loxley wants to speak about?
Underground means the Deep Roads to Derrica. But she cannot imagine that there is something similar in Loxley's world. Or if there are tunnels delving deep underground, they must be something else. Perhaps safer. Or haunted by some other, maybe more manageable kind of danger.
The question does something, tugs his focus from his own exploded, scattered view of all these things. Where he was going, what they were doing. He can feel the momentum of it, the urgency of it, sticking to the insides of his ribs, as it has for months since they witnessed dragons at raw in the sky. Each breath out eases it some more.
"A temple," he says. "Underground."
And then he tells it, as best he can. That there are people in his world who wish to bring about calamity, and corrupted the four temples that bring elemental balance to his plane. They've—he, Richard, their friends—have travelled far, restoring the temples of earth and water by drawing out their corruption, their intention to do the same to that which governs fire.
There is more, of course, maybe things that weigh on him in different ways, but he delivers this overview in an effort to help orient them both and gather his own thoughts, his hand over hers and absently stroking over her knuckles with his thumb.
"I'm making it sound easier than it all was," he adds, with a laugh. "And probably more fun."
As Loxley speaks, Derrica closes the distance between them. By the time Loxley recounts his way to the end point, the last thing he recalled before he woke up in Thedas again, she's leaned in against his side. Puts a soft kiss to his shoulder as he finishes.
"It doesn't sound easy, Loxley," she assures him.
Derrica wishes it was easy. She knows that if anything Loxley has omitted the more taxing parts to ease her mind.
He ducks his head enough to steer the tip of his nose against her hair. The scent of the soaps she washes it with, oils its treated with. As familiar as any part of his room, Kirkwall, Thedas entire.
"I'm glad to be back," he says, and it's true, even if it doesn't feel correct. These two places exist. One doesn't speak to the other. He hadn't longed for her, in Tassia, and now he doesn't long for Tassia. "The company is much improved."
He raises his head again. "Queen of Gales. That's the ship. You'd like her."
There's no outward change. No new scars, no sign of the journey he's related to her. Nothing but the weariness in him, some quiet strain she is aware of and understands, even at such a remove from his home and his travels and the tasks assigned to him.
It is a lot to carry. Derrica doesn't imagine it simply goes away now that he's here.
"It's a perfect name."
As she extricates one hand from his to put her fingers in his hair, sweep the mussed locks back from his forehead. She sits up a little taller, so she can kiss his temple.
Doesn't let herself think about what it would have been like to wake up and find him gone.
"Are you going to be alright?"
In his mission at home. In his renewed presence here.
There'd been a contented hum at her hand in his hair, the kiss to his head, eyes half-shutting. Physically still sleepy, and there is that call to push them both into those warm patches they've made in his bed, tangled up. That said, Loxley is not sure how well that would work. Whether he would find himself laying there, awake, unsure whether it would be good if he fell asleep and woke up again in caves that smell of fire, if he should wish for it.
But laying down with Derrica would only make him wish to keep doing only that, at least in the immediate. "There was another moment," he says, after some thought. "We were travelling in the snow, up this mountain. I know of myself now that the cold does not suit me," said with a quick smile, "and it was all rather miserable. But up ahead we see these lights. Figures."
There will surely be plenty of stories he can tell her, but this one niggles in its unpleasantness. And strangeness.
"So I go on ahead to try to quietly see if it's friendly or not. It was not. I was caught out when they attacked, all of my friends trying to catch up. I don't even know what they were, still, these hooded figures, but they made quick work of me. I fell, but it was strange. I ought to have slipped unconscious, and I didn't. I felt,"
and he stops, trying to summon it again, that feeling, and gives up. "Richard saw it too. He saw it was strange. It was like something in me pushed back awake, just enough that I could get out of range. I learned something, later, about me. Well. Half-learned. I still don't really know it."
Sometimes, when Loxley speaks of the things he never learned but knows he can do, it makes Derrica's heart ache for him. What a lonely thing it must be, to have something within you so far beyond your understanding and be left to grapple with it on your own.
Her fingers remain in his hair, thumb at his hairline. As he speaks, she has the same sense. To urge him down with her, so he might say these things quietly in the dark, tucked in against her. The story has not been inherently painful, but there is a new dimension to how tired Loxley is.
"Is it like what you showed me?" she asks. They'd been sitting in this room, still so new to each other. He'd shown her his magic. Derrica still remembers how it felt, the way the air around it rippled as if he were giving off heat from open flame.
Rifter magic is strange by nature. There is no censure in her tone; if there is concern, it's only ever for Loxley himself, and how he feels in response to this new thing he's acquired.
He wonders, while they sit here, if he still has that magic now. The magic he's learned. No new scars on his torso, no scent of sulphur in his hair or on his skin. He's brought back memory and a certain—something he can't define right now, but may later call focus, but that's no guarantee of magical ability.
He draws back from that, back to her question, and nods. "I think so," he says. "I think it comes from the same place."
Loxley starts to speak again, but the words catch. Looks past her, to the bed, and then leans in to kiss the corner of her mouth. "Come on," he says, taking her hand out from his hair for the moment so as best to encourage them both back amongst the bed, now that he feels less like a coiled spring.
There is not much coaxing required to reclaim their earlier position. Or something reasonably resembling it. Derrica fits herself in against him, momentarily content alongside before levering herself into his lap so she might stretch across his chest. Touch his collarbone, his jawline, the bristle of his beard, very gently as they settle there.
"Is it too big to try and talk about tonight?"
His magic.
Any other part of what he must remember, and what must now be weighing on him.
Or the act of dreaming all these memories, and waking here again.
All these things, big and complicated and difficult in their own right. They can wait until morning, if he wants. Or they can make space for them now.
Loxley helps, a hand to her thigh and an arm looped around her back, holding her close, holding himself close to her. This kind of fullness of physical contact also feels at once like he'd gotten the privilege to experience it a mere handful of hours ago, and also—months.
Or never. He's never really met anyone quite like Derrica, has he? Not anyone he's shared this with. He thinks, briefly, of full plate and gold patterns on dark skin, and then the spill of braided hair, a hand drawing back an arrow—
Derrica asks her question. He becomes aware of her touches, both the way her fingers stroke down along his jawline and the lingering tickle at his throat. His thumb strokes her skin where his hand holds her at her thigh. The answer to her question.
"I think it is," he says, a curl of humour in his tone. "Will you stay tomorrow morning? For a little while."
It is never a hardship to linger here in the morning, take their time unwinding from each other before diverging tasks call them out of this room. This won't exactly be that kind of lazy delay to the day that they've managed to sneak in the past, but that's no reason not to acquiesce.
Of course she'll stay. Of course she'll listen, however or whenever he chooses to unspool some of what he might be carrying.
She ducks her head to put a soft kiss over his heart. Thanks the many converging threads of the universe that Richard had been in place to keep this unseen injury from becoming a mortal one.
Loxley puts his hand in her hair, simply for the sake of it. A careful working through of loose waves, gentle strokes of his hand. She can feel, then, him lift his head to nudge a kiss against the crown of her skull, a lingering kind of nuzzle that seems less absent-minded or whimsical than it might usually be.
Relaxes again. Contemplates sleep, as an idea, as a concept. The lingering apprehension that somehow he might again slip through to another world, experience perhaps worse things, ebbs a little as his oblivious body's natural desire to sleep begins to override it.
Draped over him this way, Derrica can feel the way the tension leaves Loxley's body. She lifts her head, looking at him. Taking in all the familiar plans of his face, the faint glow of his eyes.
"Go back to sleep," she whispers, just a murmur against his collarbone. "It's alright."
Reassuring herself as much as reassuring him.
He can sleep. They'll both be here in the morning. That is what Derrica wills to be true.
There's a mumbled, inarticulate answer, and then silence. Eyes closed.
Dreams, then. Just the normal kind, fragmented and disorienting, as if intangible memory were still settling into the matter of his brain. A storm-filled sky, and a barren landscape littered with cracked masks. A long, clawed hand reaching out between the bars of a cage. A hooded figure, turning.
And it all kind of ebbs away, smearing aside as dreams should, ink dispersing into water, into blank unconsciousness. Loxley is normally a light sleeper, normally stirs against Derrica's still sleeping form with the intent either to avoid rousing her, or rousing her on purpose. This time, when she wakes, it is later-than-usual morning light pressing against the window, and Loxley is still and sleeping deeply beneath and around her.
Maybe it's the strangeness of the relatively late hour that wakes her.
When she sleeps here, in his bed, it has become something like a routine: Loxley moving alongside her, how even barely awake she turns in towards him.
But no, that is not what they do this morning. This morning Loxley is still sleeping, even at this uncharacteristic hour. Derrica has remained more or less in place, draped across his chest. As she stirs, lifts her head, she only goes as far as resting her chin on her hand over his heart. Takes a long moment to look at him, feel the rising ache in her chest.
Maybe it would be better to let him sleep. Derrica turns that over in her mind, settles on shifting up to put a soft kiss to his mouth. Let that decide for her whether or not it's time to get up.
Fortunately, it does not take much. The initial stirring of her waking, and then that shift of the bed as she pulls herself up enough to kiss him, that soft point of contact itself. The brighter sunlight. She feels the shift of his breathing, a deeper breath in, and a moment where perhaps he will simply settle again before the gentle weight of his hand finds a place on her back.
If he had settled back to sleep, Derrica would have been content to stay in bed. Maybe dozed back off herself. But at the light skim of his fingers, she deepens the kiss. Open-mouthed and tender, fingers light where she sets them to his cheek.
Is it any better now, in the light of day, than it had been when he'd woken up in the middle of the night? Has the knowledge he'd parceled out to her set into place any differently?
When they break apart, she pecks a second, warm kiss to his mouth before murmuring, "Are you awake?"
Not the sharpest answer, but then comes movement. A leg drawing up a little, his body shifting towards hers where she lays against him. Lifting his head enough to kiss her again, the hand in her hair now sliding his fingers against the back of her neck, her head, while his other hand finds a place on her back.
Still here. Apparently, no further days or weeks or months of knowledge coming to the surface, in those last few hours of sleep. Loxley manifests this relief in this: lazy touches and kisses, as if there'd been no discussion of merely talking to wile away the morning hours.
Maybe they do this for hours. The whole day. Derrica has never spent an entire day in bed with anyone before, but surely this is an event that might warrant it.
"Here," she murmurs, against his mouth. "I have you."
Loxley is unchanged. No new scars. No lingering traces of wherever he might have been traveling. He tastes the same. The callouses on his hands are the same. They could pretend there had been no dream, that no one had woken in the middle of the night.
But they won't.
And so Derrica pins him to the bed, toes upwards to acquire the leverage and set her weight just so. Makes I have you a more tangible thing, a reassurance given over as tenderly as she knows how.
Even before being pressed back into his bed, although now his body believes her right back in a slow, lazy redirecting of warmth and blood and tension. Unguarded, a sound hitches in his chest as she settles her weight, and he looks up at her properly, where she is more sharply rendered with more distance, time for his eyes to focus. The hard slant of sunlight sets her hair on golden fire, and it is tempting to reach for it.
He slides his fingers between hers instead, lacing their hands together, encouraging her to rest her weight down against his palms for the moment as he arches just subtly beneath her.
How nice, to fall asleep somewhere dark, and wake up to this instead.
In moments like this, where they are together, all these points of contact between them and Loxley looks at her like that, Derrica feels the force of her affection for him like the pull of the tide.
This is not unfamiliar to her; caring so deeply for someone that it reverberates through every inch of her body, gathers and settles in her chest. But the moment when the fullness of that emotion makes itself known to her, with all it's nuances and different facets, it's always—
Not fraught. Not heavy. But there is a gravity to it.
Her hands tighten over his. She has set her knees on either side of his hips. The distance between them is slight. Her weight shifts in response to the movement of his body, countering it. Dips to kiss him again, and lets that carry some of that feeling crashing in her chest down to him.
She kisses into the trailing edge of a sound in response to her moving against him. Fingers squeezing but without protest, chin lifting to meet her. Kissing back, rather than only being kissed. Feels the urgency of it, or—if not urgency, that edge of meaning. The ache of it. Meets it in kind.
"I want you," murmured, as soon as there is space for murmuring.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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"Richard's a really good healer," he says, trace humour there, but more seriously, "There's been fights. A couple of near misses. One time didn't miss, but Richard—"
Hm.
"Well, I nearly died, I sort of did, a bit, and he saved me before it took properly. But we all together saved a kingdom, chasing off the demon that'd attached herself to the royal family there. So it all sort of shakes out," and he squeezes her hand. Please don't be worried.
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Even knowing that it's a near-useless exercise, that she'll never be able to affect anything about how he moves through his own world, the anxiety about his well-being is inextricable. She still worries for Holden, wherever he is, so far beyond her reach.
When she extricates one hand from his grasp, it's only to touch his chest. Set her palm where she had seen him skim his own fingers over moments before.
"Very heroic," is sincere, even if the wrinkle of concern hasn't left her face. "Was that where you were, before you woke up? That kingdom?"
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said to reassure. It's an oddly vivid memory, of all of them (the wet thunk of a sharply-spined tail sinking directly into his heart, the odd weightlessness after), but it isn't how he woke up. Loxley lifts his hand to chase hers, flat overtop of her knuckles. He is warm, his heart is beating, no scar tissue to feel.
This will be the second time he's done this in a dream. There's no telltale scarring from the knife sunk into his side, either.
"We moved on," he says. "Last I remember, we were underground. On a journey."
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"Can you tell me to where?"
Is it something that even can be explained? Is it something Loxley wants to speak about?
Underground means the Deep Roads to Derrica. But she cannot imagine that there is something similar in Loxley's world. Or if there are tunnels delving deep underground, they must be something else. Perhaps safer. Or haunted by some other, maybe more manageable kind of danger.
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"A temple," he says. "Underground."
And then he tells it, as best he can. That there are people in his world who wish to bring about calamity, and corrupted the four temples that bring elemental balance to his plane. They've—he, Richard, their friends—have travelled far, restoring the temples of earth and water by drawing out their corruption, their intention to do the same to that which governs fire.
There is more, of course, maybe things that weigh on him in different ways, but he delivers this overview in an effort to help orient them both and gather his own thoughts, his hand over hers and absently stroking over her knuckles with his thumb.
"I'm making it sound easier than it all was," he adds, with a laugh. "And probably more fun."
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"It doesn't sound easy, Loxley," she assures him.
Derrica wishes it was easy. She knows that if anything Loxley has omitted the more taxing parts to ease her mind.
"It sounds difficult. And brave."
And dangerous.
"I'm glad you aren't doing it on your own."
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"I'm glad to be back," he says, and it's true, even if it doesn't feel correct. These two places exist. One doesn't speak to the other. He hadn't longed for her, in Tassia, and now he doesn't long for Tassia. "The company is much improved."
He raises his head again. "Queen of Gales. That's the ship. You'd like her."
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It is a lot to carry. Derrica doesn't imagine it simply goes away now that he's here.
"It's a perfect name."
As she extricates one hand from his to put her fingers in his hair, sweep the mussed locks back from his forehead. She sits up a little taller, so she can kiss his temple.
Doesn't let herself think about what it would have been like to wake up and find him gone.
"Are you going to be alright?"
In his mission at home. In his renewed presence here.
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There'd been a contented hum at her hand in his hair, the kiss to his head, eyes half-shutting. Physically still sleepy, and there is that call to push them both into those warm patches they've made in his bed, tangled up. That said, Loxley is not sure how well that would work. Whether he would find himself laying there, awake, unsure whether it would be good if he fell asleep and woke up again in caves that smell of fire, if he should wish for it.
But laying down with Derrica would only make him wish to keep doing only that, at least in the immediate. "There was another moment," he says, after some thought. "We were travelling in the snow, up this mountain. I know of myself now that the cold does not suit me," said with a quick smile, "and it was all rather miserable. But up ahead we see these lights. Figures."
There will surely be plenty of stories he can tell her, but this one niggles in its unpleasantness. And strangeness.
"So I go on ahead to try to quietly see if it's friendly or not. It was not. I was caught out when they attacked, all of my friends trying to catch up. I don't even know what they were, still, these hooded figures, but they made quick work of me. I fell, but it was strange. I ought to have slipped unconscious, and I didn't. I felt,"
and he stops, trying to summon it again, that feeling, and gives up. "Richard saw it too. He saw it was strange. It was like something in me pushed back awake, just enough that I could get out of range. I learned something, later, about me. Well. Half-learned. I still don't really know it."
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Her fingers remain in his hair, thumb at his hairline. As he speaks, she has the same sense. To urge him down with her, so he might say these things quietly in the dark, tucked in against her. The story has not been inherently painful, but there is a new dimension to how tired Loxley is.
"Is it like what you showed me?" she asks. They'd been sitting in this room, still so new to each other. He'd shown her his magic. Derrica still remembers how it felt, the way the air around it rippled as if he were giving off heat from open flame.
Rifter magic is strange by nature. There is no censure in her tone; if there is concern, it's only ever for Loxley himself, and how he feels in response to this new thing he's acquired.
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He draws back from that, back to her question, and nods. "I think so," he says. "I think it comes from the same place."
Loxley starts to speak again, but the words catch. Looks past her, to the bed, and then leans in to kiss the corner of her mouth. "Come on," he says, taking her hand out from his hair for the moment so as best to encourage them both back amongst the bed, now that he feels less like a coiled spring.
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"Is it too big to try and talk about tonight?"
His magic.
Any other part of what he must remember, and what must now be weighing on him.
Or the act of dreaming all these memories, and waking here again.
All these things, big and complicated and difficult in their own right. They can wait until morning, if he wants. Or they can make space for them now.
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Or never. He's never really met anyone quite like Derrica, has he? Not anyone he's shared this with. He thinks, briefly, of full plate and gold patterns on dark skin, and then the spill of braided hair, a hand drawing back an arrow—
Derrica asks her question. He becomes aware of her touches, both the way her fingers stroke down along his jawline and the lingering tickle at his throat. His thumb strokes her skin where his hand holds her at her thigh. The answer to her question.
"I think it is," he says, a curl of humour in his tone. "Will you stay tomorrow morning? For a little while."
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It is never a hardship to linger here in the morning, take their time unwinding from each other before diverging tasks call them out of this room. This won't exactly be that kind of lazy delay to the day that they've managed to sneak in the past, but that's no reason not to acquiesce.
Of course she'll stay. Of course she'll listen, however or whenever he chooses to unspool some of what he might be carrying.
She ducks her head to put a soft kiss over his heart. Thanks the many converging threads of the universe that Richard had been in place to keep this unseen injury from becoming a mortal one.
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Relaxes again. Contemplates sleep, as an idea, as a concept. The lingering apprehension that somehow he might again slip through to another world, experience perhaps worse things, ebbs a little as his oblivious body's natural desire to sleep begins to override it.
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"Go back to sleep," she whispers, just a murmur against his collarbone. "It's alright."
Reassuring herself as much as reassuring him.
He can sleep. They'll both be here in the morning. That is what Derrica wills to be true.
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Dreams, then. Just the normal kind, fragmented and disorienting, as if intangible memory were still settling into the matter of his brain. A storm-filled sky, and a barren landscape littered with cracked masks. A long, clawed hand reaching out between the bars of a cage. A hooded figure, turning.
And it all kind of ebbs away, smearing aside as dreams should, ink dispersing into water, into blank unconsciousness. Loxley is normally a light sleeper, normally stirs against Derrica's still sleeping form with the intent either to avoid rousing her, or rousing her on purpose. This time, when she wakes, it is later-than-usual morning light pressing against the window, and Loxley is still and sleeping deeply beneath and around her.
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When she sleeps here, in his bed, it has become something like a routine: Loxley moving alongside her, how even barely awake she turns in towards him.
But no, that is not what they do this morning. This morning Loxley is still sleeping, even at this uncharacteristic hour. Derrica has remained more or less in place, draped across his chest. As she stirs, lifts her head, she only goes as far as resting her chin on her hand over his heart. Takes a long moment to look at him, feel the rising ache in her chest.
Maybe it would be better to let him sleep. Derrica turns that over in her mind, settles on shifting up to put a soft kiss to his mouth. Let that decide for her whether or not it's time to get up.
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Smooths up her spine, into her hair.
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Is it any better now, in the light of day, than it had been when he'd woken up in the middle of the night? Has the knowledge he'd parceled out to her set into place any differently?
When they break apart, she pecks a second, warm kiss to his mouth before murmuring, "Are you awake?"
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Not the sharpest answer, but then comes movement. A leg drawing up a little, his body shifting towards hers where she lays against him. Lifting his head enough to kiss her again, the hand in her hair now sliding his fingers against the back of her neck, her head, while his other hand finds a place on her back.
Still here. Apparently, no further days or weeks or months of knowledge coming to the surface, in those last few hours of sleep. Loxley manifests this relief in this: lazy touches and kisses, as if there'd been no discussion of merely talking to wile away the morning hours.
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Maybe they do this for hours. The whole day. Derrica has never spent an entire day in bed with anyone before, but surely this is an event that might warrant it.
"Here," she murmurs, against his mouth. "I have you."
Loxley is unchanged. No new scars. No lingering traces of wherever he might have been traveling. He tastes the same. The callouses on his hands are the same. They could pretend there had been no dream, that no one had woken in the middle of the night.
But they won't.
And so Derrica pins him to the bed, toes upwards to acquire the leverage and set her weight just so. Makes I have you a more tangible thing, a reassurance given over as tenderly as she knows how.
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Even before being pressed back into his bed, although now his body believes her right back in a slow, lazy redirecting of warmth and blood and tension. Unguarded, a sound hitches in his chest as she settles her weight, and he looks up at her properly, where she is more sharply rendered with more distance, time for his eyes to focus. The hard slant of sunlight sets her hair on golden fire, and it is tempting to reach for it.
He slides his fingers between hers instead, lacing their hands together, encouraging her to rest her weight down against his palms for the moment as he arches just subtly beneath her.
How nice, to fall asleep somewhere dark, and wake up to this instead.
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This is not unfamiliar to her; caring so deeply for someone that it reverberates through every inch of her body, gathers and settles in her chest. But the moment when the fullness of that emotion makes itself known to her, with all it's nuances and different facets, it's always—
Not fraught. Not heavy. But there is a gravity to it.
Her hands tighten over his. She has set her knees on either side of his hips. The distance between them is slight. Her weight shifts in response to the movement of his body, countering it. Dips to kiss him again, and lets that carry some of that feeling crashing in her chest down to him.
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"I want you," murmured, as soon as there is space for murmuring.
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slaps down that nsfw tag.
good work
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slaps down bow