Liliana Vess Defiant Necromancer

It had been well over a year since Ignis had truly had to sleep the light, watchful sleep of a man surrounded by constant danger; it had been well over a month since the approach of a light step and an impossibly cool body had become a welcome comfort to his reflexes and not an immediate jump of nerves that needed to be quelled and calmed and reassured. That his hand reached, subconscious and instinctual, not for a weapon, but for Liliana; to shift not for defense, but for contentment, until she was settled in and they could both drift off together.

And that was how it was, just then, in that moment, at first, anyway. A slight stirring, the exhaustion that still clung to him making the sigh a reluctant one as he murmured back. "'Iana..."

But then he breathed in, and instead of the comforting mulberry and cedar he'd been craving all day, there was a strong undercurrent of blood in there that set the wiring in his brain back...not even so far as the Long Nights of Eos, but to moments far more recent: to fingers brushing glass from her hair in the bathroom upstairs, to kneeling, clinging, desperate and afraid in the living room of his apartment.

"Where were you?" he asked, the accusation in it softened considerably by the relief, as he pulled himself up and pulled himself impulsively back; a war of contradictions battling within him still, he also reached out for her. "Are you alright? You didn't...." He couldn't bring himself to say it, to put words to the heavy thing dropping into his stomach just then, that she'd gone back to Innistrad, without telling him, after he'd specifically asked her not to, "...did you?"