This is not what she came here for. Leliana could not truthfully say what she had come here for, but it wasn't this. It wasn't affection. Some visceral, desperate need to see Morrigan and confirm that she was solid and real and well might have been part of it; this giving way had not. Without intending to she leans into the contact of Morrigan's stroking her hair, and perhaps that is part of what makes this so inevitable and appealing, in its own way. With Morrigan she is a shade more impulsive, more real, like some part of her is prompted by the proximity to someone who pushed and barbed her so long ago. Old fascinations overriding her newer severity, even if the severity has been several years worn in.

Morrigan speaks, because Morrigan is incapable of not getting the last word in, and Leliana exhales something that could have been a near-silent laugh if Morrigan's mouth were not meeting hers. It seems so strangely chaste, and so much more real for Leliana not feeling as though her fingertips and lips were buzzing and numbing from brandy. After pressing her hand to Morrigan's lower back just for half a moment, steadying, Leliana pulls both her hands away to start pulling away the gloves and bracers. That is a secondary focus, though, and as such takes longer than it might, purely because Leliana is more interested in pressing a lingering kiss to the corner of Morrigan's mouth, to her jaw and to her chin before her lips graze upward and she hangs in the breath between kisses, savouring or inviting or daring, and maybe all of those things woven together with a thread of trepidation. Morrigan has always reminded her of storms, the way her magic smells when it gather and seems to linger on her skin after casting, and she is not entirely certain she is not simply caught in the eye of a storm now as she slowly presses the bare palm of her hand to the exposed skin of Morrigan's lower back.