driftfleet | it's a mingle, a paisley mingle

"You're the one bringin' it up," she said, tilting her head a little and smiling.

"Merely remarked that's what 'bad saturday afternoon special' sounded like to me. You're the one making up words again." First burger bombs, now this. Oy.

She rolled her eyes at him and slowly began to pull her gloved finger out of his. "That's 'cause almost anythin' sounds like sex to you."

She shook her head and her smirk deepened, "An' I warned ya I'd keep makin' words up. Almost makes me sad that I wasn't doin' it this time."

"'tis a versatile thing," he said, almost primly.

He snorted. "You could claim you had anyway. I wouldn't know."

"What's the fun in that?" She propped her hand on her hip. No point in taking credit for something she didn't actually do.

"Plenty of fun." He would know. He's made a practice of such thing... with anyone but Rogue. He grinned at her.

"Flights of fancy are the best sort."

Rogue took a step closer, her gaze sparking with mischief and something else entirely, "You're only sayin' that 'cause I haven't taken ya flying yet."

He snorted. "Thor hasn't cured me of my like of flight, I doubt you could do worse."

She rolled her eyes, smiling. "Your confidence fills me with such satisfaction."

Leaning up, she kissed his cheek, "Go on an' find some books, sugah. I'll be in the poetry section."

He laughed. "You know I have every confidence in you." He moved to catch her a kiss on the lips. "I shall find you once I've poked around a bit."

Rogue smiled, pleased with the change in kiss and leaned back up to give him another, slightly lingering. These gaps in time and changes just kept happening between them, first upon his return to Asgard when she'd thought he was lost to her forever, then all the way through the whole year he'd been absent from Luceti and the months she'd been here without him. His most recent disappearance had stirred up old wounds, and she felt awkward in her flirtations, uncertain in her attempts to reassert their mutual place in each other's lives.

He said nothing changed for him, and she believed him, but it was hard to feel secure in a relationship when so much of the time she remembered kept getting stolen, when she knew that she changed and she wasn't at all sure how to share those changes with him, when she didn't know how to catch him up. She wasn't an open person by nature, and life's hard lessons had only served to close her off more. Rogue trusted Loki with her heart, mind, and body, but she didn't know how to invite him in, didn't know how to make up for lost time. So she grasped at any indication of continuing desire and affection like it was a flashlight in the dark.

After a long moment, she broke the kiss, settled back down on her heels and smiled at him, "I'll be waitin' for you. There's a poem I wanna show you," she continued, a touch of shyness to the tone, "so I'm gonna go find the book."

Ah, if she mentioned it, then it must be important. So he had better not linger over his own books much longer than it would take her to find the one she wished, he decided. He must not get too distracted. "I shall find you in good time, then."

He took himself off through the shelves and did a bit of searching through, keeping tabs on his own internal sense of timing. After something he deemed a suitable length, he headed to the poetry section to find her, a couple of data tablets tucked under one arm for further reading later.

Rogue had been worried she wouldn't be able to find the book and in fact, it had taken her a little while. She'd only read it once and it had a funny name... she did, eventually, meet with success. She found the spot in the book and marked it, and continued to browse until Loki joined her. She glanced up at him, "Hello. Find anythin' you like?"

"I found a few bits of interest. Knot theory and the like." He smiled. "What have you here?"

A sudden bout of nerves fluttering in her throat. "I'll show you. There are chairs this way."

And she led the way deeper into the library to two sitting chairs near a potted plant as opposed to the more popular views of space. While Rogue had never been overly fond of the view in the fleet, Loki may or may not have noticed that since he'd woken up, Rogue had been actively, if subconsciously, avoiding placing herself unnecessarily around windows.

She took the seat which left her back exposed to the room, both trusting Loki to watch it and giving him the seat where his back could be against the pillar.

"All right." He followed her and sat once she did, relieved that she let him have the seat where his back would feel safer. Very thoughtful of her in regards to his deeply ingrained paranoias.

He hadn't really noticed the avoidance of windows yet, though it would eventually add up to something at the back of his mind.

"What have you?"

Rogue opened the book to the correct page. Her nerves hadn't left her, but she was determined to see this through. "It's called A Valediction Forbidding Mourning."

Quietly, aware that she hadn't really done this since he was blinded and that had been out of necessity rather than her ceding to his often mentioned tease of her reading to him, Rogue began to read:

"As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun."

Loki settled back to listen as she read. To him, too, it brought to mind those days when she'd read to him, when he couldn't read for himself. (A few others had read to him as well, in those days, but it wasn't quite the same. Rogue held a unique place in his life.)

There was a good deal of meaning to that poem, the geometry within it something that immediately caught his attention and held it. Eyes half-closed, hands loosely clasped over his stomach, he was silent for a bit after Rogue finished reading, rolling the words about in his mind. "Circumstances do change," he agreed. "But there are universal constants yet."

The pause between when she finished and when he spoke was a little nerve-wrecking, wondering at his opinion of everything from the poem itself to the message it contained. When he finally spoke, it didn't answer any of her questions, but it did provide her with an opening to continue with what she wanted to stay.

"The thing is," she shifted back and forth in her hair. "I know it's gonna sound silly because I know how much ya thrive on chaos, but with the way things have been between us these past two years, I feel like you're the steady half of the compass. Time keeps changin' for me, an' I adapt an' move when you're not here -- but then you come back, an' you remember. And it's like -- clickin' a puzzle piece back together. It pulls me right back so it doesn't really matter what else happened while ya were gone."

Hesistent, she extended her hand to him, "'Makes me end where I begun.'"

He reached to take her hand, smoothing his thumb over her knuckles. "'tis curious indeed," he said. "For I think of you as my steady center. My... unfailing heart." The emotional constant of his life had come to be her, the one person he could rely upon in all the realms after he had so foolishly lost his mother.

That was... something to hear. She had no idea how to deal with something like that in the face of all his comings and goings. She wished that his words would hang in the air, suspended like an ornament so she could view them from all sides, poke and prod them in the shadow and the light.

"...I know that it can't be easy for ya, comin' an' goin' like this with me still -- havin' time. It's not easy for me either. But I think it's still worth it, even though it's hard."

He smiled crookedly. "And here, I thought that I had the easy end of it." For all the emotional traps he might face upon returning, he did not have to experience that missing time. Rogue was far more faithful than he really thought he had the capacity to be in such a situation. "But yes, I think it well worth it, too."

Well, she'd said it. She did feel a little better for saying it, because it was both true and real, and now it wouldn't be hovering in the realm of uncertainty or regret. But it didn't make the gap she felt between them any smaller. And Rogue wasn't sure how to fix that. Her natural response to being hurt was to withdraw or to fight, and it had hurt each time he'd went away. She hadn't thought of herself as putting up walls between them, but sometimes things just didn't feel as free and easy between them as she remembered. Memories tended to get rose-tainted, true, but she didn't know what to say or do now. She felt awkward and Rogue ducked her head, attempted a tease. "Well... good. Hate ta think you'd be hangin' around for nothin'."

He laughed, squeezing her hand. "I've something precious to keep me about." More precious than gold, and all of the secrets he'd clutched to himself. To be loved; what a thing that was, and he still found it strange at times. Stranger still, to love someone else. "And you tell me the funniest jokes, with your made-up words," he teased.

"Better'n makin' random things plural just 'cause I feel like it," she said, smiling at him a little. She liked hearing his laugh.

So this was it, huh? Her big emotional gambit and he made old jokes because they hadn't made any new ones, and he was fine with that because no time had passed for him, but it had for her, and she wanted to try to make things right -- she had tried, in bringing this up... but maybe the gap would just always be there, and she didn't know how to say it any better. She was sure he'd try to bridge it if he knew how she'd felt.

...hadn't she told him, though? Maybe this was his way of trying to bridge it. Maybe they just needed more time.

it's a mingle, a paisley mingle

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