Re: Hedeby: Lagertha/Ragnar
Her gaze fell from his when his hand found her arm, focused no longer on his face (pale eyes, full mouth, rough of beard) but instead on the curl of his fingers and the brush of his thumb (wide fingers, strong grip gone frustratingly gentle). She was raw and sensitive, still riding the high of taking a life, still with the scent of blood in her nostrils. Every sense felt stretched to its limit, and she shivered as his thumb brushed its path back and forth. It was warm on the other side of the rough-woven sleeve of her dress (warm the way his hands were so often warm - she remembered), and the threads chafed at her skin. There was a new tension, a growing one, a hotter one. One that took her desire for battle and turned it into something else.
She closed her eyes, breathed deeply through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, all the air leaving her lungs until she drew breath again. She would not admit to the tremble at the end of her breath, nor how glad she was when his hand dropped away. There had been more than once that they had come together after a fight - either a battle with others or a fight between themselves - but this was not the time for that. (It would never be - not again - they were no longer those people.) Though that did not stop it from reflecting in her gaze when she opened her eyes once again to look at him (heat and intensity and a brief press together of her lips).
Perhaps she could have (should have) defended her so-recently dead husband. Perhaps her loyalty should have held even after slipping the blade into his body, across his throat. Perhaps she should have said that Sigvard had been worthy enough to stand as her husband. Perhaps it should have been said with anger. Perhaps it would have been, had Ragnar not followed the first statement so closely with his own admission of not being deserving of her. And that, in her shock and anxiety and lingering battlelust, earned a reluctant smile instead of anger. Had anyone asked her why, she would not have been able to explain her own emotions in that moment. But her smile was a faint twist and lift of her lips, heat in her eyes, and a turning away of her body once again. But not until she pressed her own fingertips to the back of his hand - onetwothree - and traced them toward his knuckles, lingering only a moment before she stepped away and they lifted from his skin.
And only then, her back to him again and pulling a breath to attempt to steady herself (visible, a lifting of her shoulders and a forced relaxation of the line of her spine), did she speak again. "You have wanted him dead since the first moment I spoke of him." Her voice was throaty, and she attempted to clear it with a soft cough, stepping to a water-filled basin and beginning to scrub away the rusty stains from her hands.