Work Text:
It is the night after Weisshaupt, and the mood at the Lighthouse is as dark as a gathering storm.
Rook is sprawled out on the green leather settee in the expansive central library, toying with her mageknife and watching Lucanis stir something dark and syrupy into a tin mug of coffee from across the table.
She wonders what Emmrich is up to.
She had seen the older mage wander off with Bellara in the direction of his quarters after dinner, gesticulating animatedly, the words “counter-resonance” and “reactive dampening” and “third volume of Harris’s Essays” drifting down from the second floor balcony as their footsteps faded to echoes. She had felt a twinge of envy at the sight, but stamped it out with the recollection of the relief in Emmrich’s eyes as she had burst through the doors to the War Room last night, the feel of his hand resting briefly against her bloodied cheek before the companions had stepped back out into the tempest of chaos.
She senses that whatever collegial curiosity he shares with Bellara is entirely different from the sweat-soaked ecstasy they had shared that night stretched out on his healer’s table, not two days past. Still, they have not had a moment’s privacy since, and she wonders what thoughts are churning in the meticulous machinery of his mind.
Rook is quickly discovering that she finds that machinery unbearably sexy, a delicately wrought instrument for which she wants to discover the source of its every tick, and it is proving to be a powerful distraction in late idle hours such as these.
“Your Rialtiso is getting cold,” says Lucanis. One arched eyebrow climbs even higher toward the winged peaks of his mane.
“Sorry.” Rook swings her feet to the floor and swipes the mug from the table, briefly inhaling the scent of cocoa and spice and star-seed. “Little late for coffee, isn’t it?”
“Please. It’s half chocolate,” he replies, but his stare is distant, his eyes trained on the steam unfurling from the mug in his cupped hands, as though he might divine the signals in its wafting smoke. Ever since his failed assassination attempt the evening prior her childhood friend has been quiet, subdued, and she raps her knuckles on the table in an attempt to jolt him out of his self-pitying fugue.
“It is sweet. Reminds me of that place in Heart and Central, the one we went to after the Erdolan affair,” says Rook, taking another sip of the concoction and affecting a skeptical pucker. “What was it called?”
“‘Otahn’s Overlook'.'” Lucanis pulls a face in return and crosses his ankle over his knee. “As if every shop in Treviso doesn’t sit by a bridge and some running water.”
“Yes!” Rook grins. “Maker, that place was hideously overpriced. They’d sell you a bag of beans like it was worth its weight in gold.”
“In fairness, some coffee is.” Lucanis shrugs. “Besides, it’s not like you would care, you’re the daughter of the Queen of Thieves.”
“She’s a perfectly respectable jeweler,” says Rook, in her best fake-prim Altus-chic voice. Lucanis rolls his eyes. “I’m on the straight and narrow, now, anyways. No heists or getaways or jailbreaks for me.”
Lucanis says nothing to this, and she spots her mistake a moment too late. Silence descends, and Rook watches the astrolabe spin ponderously overhead.
“So… what’s really with the late night coffee?” she asks after a moment.
Lucanis uncrosses his legs and sets the mug down. Every motion is fluid, precise, with an assassin’s preternatural grace. In his watchful stillness she feels the tension of the prey crouched before the predator, even though she knows rationally that Lucanis would never harm a hair on her head.
But still it is uncomfortable, and grows increasingly so as the silence stretches out.
“The First Warden,” he says finally, and she is surprised at the words. “He was wrong, and you were right. You have been this whole time. Those people deserved better.” He lifts his gaze and his eyes meet hers, dark and glittering as the eponymous crow. “The Skadi I know would have punched him out cold and taken over the situation herself. But instead you tried to reason with him. To talk sense into a senseless fool. Why?”
Rook is the silent one now, watching the steam fade from the surface of her mug, the ripples settling into a cool and placid stillness.
“… I thought it was right.”
“But it wasn’t, and you know it.” Lucanis abandons his drink and stands, pacing beneath the eerie blank eyes of the murals that have bloomed to life around the gem-blue icons of howling wolves. “You’re going soft, Skadi. You’re letting your blade get dull, and eventually it’s going to get you killed.”
“We’re still here, aren’t we?” Rook sets her mug down and fidgets with the brass curved edge of the table, irritated. “You worry about you, I’ll worry about me.”
“But I am worried about you. And it is distracting me.” Lucanis pauses before the couch, glaring down at her.
“Hey - don’t blame me for your mistakes.” Rook stands to face him, crossing her arms and planting her feet wide to make up for her shorter stature.
“How can I not?” Lucanis scowls. “You’re the one who put this team together, the only one Solas can reach. Hell, you’re the only one crazy enough to believe we can pull this job off. I see you put yourself in danger every day, yet… somehow, the more horrors we face, the softer you get.”
Rook contemplates this for a moment, considering the words. Finally she answers, in a voice so quiet as to be almost a whisper: “Emmrich says that death should not be our first second chance.”
“Ha!” Lucanis lets out a short, disbelieving laugh. “So, do I have the old death mage to blame for you losing your edge?”
“Of course not! Emmrich is helping me with my magic, more than the Shadow Dragons were able to. And studying the Fade, the connection to Solas, everything we’ve uncovered so far.” Rook tries to tamp down the flicker of electricity sparking inside, clamoring to be unleashed. “He’s helping all of us! We’re lucky to have him, so don’t put this on him either.” She frowns. “And don’t say ‘death mage’ like it’s any worse than ‘storm mage’ - or have you forgotten that I’m one of those possible contracts you’re so obsessed with fulfilling now?”
“Death mage or no, I didn’t see him helping much at Weisshaupt. Besides, there’s no need to get wound up, I was just -” His eyes narrow, and in them she spies a sudden and knowing gleam. “Hold on a minute. Are you… sleeping with him?”
Rook glares. “That is - ugh, that is so incredibly not your business!”
“Rook! You are! I can’t believe it.” A long-suffering exhale. He is back to calling her by her new name, her magename, and she flinches at the sound of the cool formality of it rolling off of her old friend’s tongue. “Everything that happens on this team is everyone’s business. You said it yourself. We were too distracted yesterday, and it brought us to ruin. And now you’re getting involved with someone nearly twice your age?” His voice drips disappointment and scorn, neither of which are warranted.
Rook shakes her head, as if to dispel the words. “Stick to killing people, Luc,” she growls, taking a step towards him. “Your math skills are terrible.”
“Not as terrible as your judgment.”
The words echo into silence, as fragile as thin-spun glass. Rook stands frozen for a moment, as though waiting for it to shatter.
In the quiet she hears a scuffing sound, and a woman’s anxious sigh.
“Oh… no,” says Bellara from above, and Rook lifts her gaze to see Bellara and Emmrich standing at the railing of the second floor balcony. Rook catches a fleeting glimpse of the necromancer’s face, his upraised eyebrows and blood-drained cheeks, before he turns and disappears back down the hallway.
“Emmrich, wait!” Rook vaults over the lower railing and dashes up the stairs, racing past Bellara down the hall to Emmrich’s quarters.
But he is absent from his room, and from every room of the Lighthouse that she searches. He’s used his time slowing trick, no doubt, to escape without notice to some quiet and contemplative hole. She leans over balconies and peers under crate lids and kneels beneath beds, cursing herself for not paying better attention when Neve had tried to teach her a spell of location.
“Manfred, have you seen Emmrich?” she asks breathlessly, skidding to a halt before the skeleton where he stands swaying in front of a statue of a stern-faced elven queen on the outer balcony.
Manfred tilts his head so far she can see the gaps between each vertebrae, his expression fixed in that permanent, glowing grin.
“Please,” she says, her voice fracturing at the word.
Manfred tilts his head to the opposite side and extends his hands, palms pressed together, as Emmrich so often does. Then he folds them open, as if they are two halves of a book’s spine.
“The library?” She frowns. She has just come from the library, the soaring atrium at the heart of their strange sanctuary. “Oh! The other library! Thanks, Manfred!”
She blows the skeleton a kiss and he waggles his head side-to-side excitedly as she turns and races down the stairs, vaulting over yet another staircase - damn, this Solas asshole loves stairs, she bets his calves are absolutely magnificent - and darts left to enter the room with the portals. One leads to the Dread Wolf’s study, filled with moldering bins and gilded chairs and two hilariously massive wolf statues. The other leads to a smaller library, one that Emmrich discovered by solving a particularly intricate series of puzzles in Solas’s study while Rook sat with her ankles crossed on the elf god’s desk calling out increasingly absurd encouragement until the older mage had asked her to “please refrain from showering me with any more flattery, for fear you do irreparable harm to my ego” and Rook had collapsed into giggles at the look of sheepish vexation on his face. This library is spacious and quiet, with a vaulted ceiling spelled to look like the sky above ancient Arlathan. Or so Emmrich says - the stars look like stars to Rook, just as they do everywhere, only wheeling through an especially purple sky.
She blinks searing white from her vision as she steps through the portal and into the study, a vast space dotted with chairs and couches, the central floor anchored by a gold-rimmed circular grate that opens out to the swirling Fade sky beneath. Books line the walls and drift with lazy grace through the air above, pages fluttering and spines rotating as they circle some invisible axis.
Emmrich is standing before the shelves that border the curving walls, his fingertips trailing along the dusty spines of the books they house. At the sound of her entry he glances up, then back to the shelves, something crossing his features like a passing cloud.
“Hiding?” she asks, approaching the shelves where he stands. A chandelier lights the central area beneath the dancing nebulas above, a stack of rune-carved metal rings rotating around a globe of witchlight. In its white-gold glow Emmrich looks drawn and starkly handsome, all sharp lines and gilded trappings.
“Retreating,” he says. “To a place that reminds me of home.”
She lifts a hand to his forearm, the bangles clinking beneath her touch, but he draws away and turns to the next shelf.
Great. Fifty-two years old, and the man can still sulk like a teenager. This is going to take some fixing.
Rook does not follow, merely plants her hands on her hips and stares at his cute, cowardly little back. “So, how much did you hear?”
Emmrich sighs, turning back to look at her. There is regret etched in his hazel eyes, beneath the traces of kohl and the lines of time. She hopes it is not for her, for the one perfect night they have spent together, a memory already fading like the bittersweet taste of chocolate melting on her tongue.
“Enough to hear the reason in our canny assassin’s words.”
Rook snorts. “Canny, my Trevisan ass. Don’t listen to him. Lucanis is an overprotective hothead who can’t see clearly when it comes to people he cares about.”
“… and he cares about you.”
“Not like that!” Rook passes a hand through her mahogany-dark hair, expelling a breath as she searches for the words to describe the situation. “Lucanis is like a big brother. A broody, annoying, overprotective big brother. Two, now, if you count Spite.” She rolls her eyes.
Emmrich twists one of the rings at his fingers, a faceted emerald. It glints beneath the witchlight and the ghostly glimmer of stars. “Like a brother, indeed. And he believes I should be like a father to you, not a lover, does he not?”
“Come on, Emmrich.” Rook’s voice softens, and she takes a step towards him. She catches a whiff of his scent, the alluring spice of incense, and longs to relax the tense lines of his body with her touch. “I’m nearly thirty. That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? Fathering children at twenty-two would hardly have been ridiculous.”
She grins. “Somehow I can’t see you with toddling babies. Think about poor Manfred - he’d be so jealous!”
A smile traces Emmrich’s face at last, smoothing the furrow of his thin brows. “Whether Manfred is able to experience envy as we do is a line of inquiry I have not yet pursued, but -” He frowns, realizing his error. “But I will not allow you to distract me!”
Emmrich turns away from her to pace along the upper dais of the room. There is a railing between the shelves on the upper floor and the sunken space below, and his hand slides along it as he walks, as though he is trying to ground himself in the space, draw strength from its structure.
“That is precisely the problem,” he says after a moment, as though arguing with himself. “We are all distracted. Lucanis, myself, you - you, most of all.” He turns back. “With Varric recovering, the team perceives you as our leader.” She begins to speak, but he shakes his head. “You know they do. We do. I do not wish to jeopardize that, any more than I already have.”
“You haven’t jeopardized anything,” says Rook with exasperation. “I’ve grown more in a month fighting by your side than a decade with the mages in Minrathous. You’re patient, and encouraging, and smart. You’re a hell of a good teacher.” She grins. “Plus, you’ve kept me alive every time I bite off more demon than I can chew.”
“Mmm.” Emmrich makes a noncommittal noise, though she sees he can find no fault with her argument. She reaches out and sets her hand to his cheek, sliding her thumb along the high cheekbones, the tight-clenched jaw. “You’re helping me with my magic, teaching me better control, so we can face these threats and stop the risen gods together.”
“Yes, but…”
Rook steps closer, her chest brushing his, Emmrich backing against the shelves.
“And your last, uh, healing, left me feeling far more…” She leans in, backing him against the lines of books, pressing his spine against those endless spines. She slides her hand lower. “… focused.”
At this, Emmrich blushes. It is a sight more precious than any treasure.
She tugs on the stays of his trousers, releasing the tie in one slow, fluid motion. Her eyes stay trained on his, watching for any sign of discomfort, any signal to stop, but he gazes back with barely-concealed longing, and she smiles.
“Look - other people can’t tell us what’s right. Only we can. Does this feel right?” She skims her hand over the ridge of his cock, feeling it swelling to meet her. Her hand slides further, slipping inside his trousers, taking him in hand. He is warm to the touch, deliciously so, and stiffens beneath her fingers.
“Rook…” he says, his normally bell-bright voice coming out hoarse and thick.
She is stroking him now, her hand wrapped tight around his cock, his skin velvet-soft beneath her touch.
“Does this?”
Emmrich makes a long, low noise, somewhere between a groan and a whine. Rook presses her lips to his throat, wanting to taste that sound with her lips and tongue. She pauses to lick her palm, a long, savoring motion, then resumes her work as she kisses his neck, his chin tilting up as she speeds her pace, his body coiling tight beneath her.
“So, should we keep going? Or should we stop? Do you want me to stop?”
She is moving faster, gripping tighter, and Emmrich is touching her now, his hands clutching her waist, his face buried in her hair, his breath coming short and thick through the curtain of her hair.
“Don’t stop,” he whispers, “don’t stop.”
She closes her eyes and leans against him and they cling to each other until he comes with a shuddering, whimpering cry. She lifts her chin to shower his with kisses before releasing him from her grip, her other hand already plucking the handkerchief from his vest and offering it to him with a smiling flourish.
“Thank you,” Emmrich says with excruciating politeness, as he tidies up and re-laces his trousers. His stiffly formal tone softens when he tucks the handkerchief away and leans in to kiss her on the lips. “I… seem to find myself coming entirely undone in your presence. If you are the elemental essence of lightning, then consider myself well-struck.”
Rook cannot resist this one. “Oh, you’re definitely com-”
She is silenced by the press of two fingers at her lips, her eyes widening as Emmrich slides them into her mouth. She watches him, mesmerized, as he shakes his head in indulgent amusement, Rook instinctually sucking on his fingers before he withdraws them from her mouth.
“Enough talking, my dear Rook. You’ve made it abundantly clear that that is not what you came here to do.”
He spins them both so that she is up against the shelves now, and hikes up the long hem of her skirt. She is out of her underwear faster than a rock darter flies, and feels fingers slick with the wetness of her own tongue gliding teasingly between her folds.
“Yes, professor,” she says, and - though she is going for coy - there is an eagerness to her voice that widens his smile.
“Emmrich, please!” he tuts.
Maker, he makes it too easy.
“So… I take it you don’t want to be called ‘daddy’, either?”
Emmrich glowers at her, but it is belied by the eager pressure of his hand between her legs. “You are undercutting your prior arguments rather effectively by acting like a child,” he chastises. His finger quests deeper, slipping inside and sending a jolt of electricity through her, a shockwave of pleasure. “When you are patently a woman.”
She rolls her hips against his hand, silenced for a moment by its deft and patient movements. She feels warmth, pressure, heat, radiating out from everywhere he touches, like he is kindling a fire and it has finally caught.
“Damn,” she rasps after a moment, and he raises one artful eyebrow. “But you already…” She makes a vague gesture. “I’m not the best planner in the world, but I really didn’t think this one through.”
“Indeed, improvisation is more your strong suit,” chuckles Emmrich. “Which I admire! And most certainly benefit from.” He leans in for a kiss, harder and hungrier. When he draws back his eyes are dancing, witchlight sparking in his eyes like motes from a fire. “Happily, I know a little improvisational trick of my own to replenish one’s spent… abilities.” His tone grows thoughtful, professorial. She is almost embarrassed by how wet she is getting. Almost. “It really is intended more for the application of healing arts to mortal injury, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to inject some vigor mortis into the day-to-day…”
“Did you… just say… vigor mortis?” pants Rook, as he withdraws his hand and mutters something. It sounds like poetry, or prayer.
“I did.” Green magic washes over him, settling and flaring for a moment before his skin fades back to its usual pale glow. “And voila - I’m ready again!”
Rook laughs and watches as more magic streaks out from his fingers, sinking like grappling hooks into a hundred books on the shelves. The tomes fly outwards, spinning and stacking themselves into tidy rows to form a square pedestal of long-forgotten literature, rising to exactly the height of Emmrich’s hips.
“Your control is amazing,” she says, with unaffected admiration. Rook could zap all the lights in the entire Lighthouse with one bad dream, but she could never in a million years manipulate the Fade with such precision.
“You truly have no idea,” murmurs Emmrich, as he slips the straps of her top aside and slides the fabric from her limbs, his fingertips trailing her skin like ripples on a still pool. “It is impeccable.”
Oh.
“Well. Um. This seems… unstable,” she laughs nervously as Emmrich hoists her onto the book pile, glancing down at Solas’s collected treasury of words, though not a page flutters as she settles into place. Somehow Emmrich has turned the tables, and now she is the one off-balance - literally and figuratively, her knees parting to welcome his body between them and grip him tight for purchase.
“Not at all! The spines are held together with a temporary manifestation of spirit glue, a powerful adhesive made from the ground bones of ghosts. Highly adherent, supremely flexible, and leaves no trace when dispelled.” His grin grows wicked, his hands sliding up her thighs. “We would hardly wish to damage the tomes, would we?”
She pulls him in by the straps of his vest and begins tearing through buttons. They are kissing, touching, lips and fingers mapping new terrain with clumsy fervor. It takes an eternity to unwrap the gift of him, unlinking chains and clasps and unraveling fabric one layer after another, but eventually they are both bare to the air, skin sliding against skin in a dance of perfect friction.
Emmrich’s lips trail from her mouth to her neck, traveling down to her breasts, his teeth grazing gently over the thin skin at her nipples, his breath warm as he speaks.
“Rook, when I left, earlier… Lucanis’s words struck deep because I understand them, understand his desire to protect you,” he whispers. “You are a treasure worth protecting.”
He works his cock between her legs and she rocks against the bulk of him, a humming noise emanating from her throat. She can feel him stirred back to life, fully replenished by the wash of necromantic magic. His breathing is rapid, shallow, the words coming in bursts as his lips travel back up towards her ears.
“I have lived my life in the shadow of death, in fear of its inexorable encroachment. But these days I find myself willing to throw myself into its ravenous jaws time and again.” He guides himself inside her, stretching the slick tight core of her open and spearing her with perfect pressure. “For you, Rook.”
“Fenedhis lasa -” She lets out a curse at the sensation, at the feeling of him thrusting into the slick wetness that has been gathering ever since his back hit the shelves moments earlier.
“Pardon?” Emmrich draws back a touch, his head cocking with interest even as his hips move against her, an agonizingly slow and blissful pace.
“Sorry,” she pants, “Elvish. Just… protecting your genteel ears from the filth.”
“Ah. That is most appreciated!”
There is nothing genteel about what he’s doing to her now, though. He begins to fuck her in earnest, her fingernails digging into the bony blades of his shoulders, her legs enfolding his waist and her hips churning against his; harder, deeper, faster, the shockwave now building into a tidal wave that is growing, rising, lapping its way up from her cunt to her throat. He braces his arms against the shelves behind, his eyes fluttering along with hers, his breath ragged in the silence.
“Let me hear that noise again,” she purrs, though her own throat is burning, her vision reddening at the edges, a prickling sensation trailing across her skin.
Emmrich smiles, though on a man less gentle she might call it a smirk.
“Ladies first,” he murmurs, and with a shudder and a cry she obeys.
There is a claw-footed loveseat in the sunken dais below, bracketed by floating gold disks in lieu of side tables, and afterwards Emmrich and Rook sink gratefully into its velvet embrace. Rook settles deep into the cushions and tips her head back to gaze up at the celestial infinity beyond, tamping down a sense of dizzying vertigo at the sight of the ghostly Fade sky beneath their feet and the lost elven sky soaring overhead, their own minuscule slice of the Fade drifting between two endless oceans of stars. Emmrich leans forward, his face still touched with color, methodically lacing his boots up to the wing-tipped knees.
“You said this reminded you of home?” asks Rook, her gaze dropping to the man seated beside her. For all their time together she still feels that she has barely scratched the surface of knowing him; as though he is one of the monumental tomes straining the shelves, and she has read naught but the first few pages.
“Indeed!” says Emmrich, straightening up and placing his hands atop his thighs, his spine straight and his eyes sparkling as he takes in the scene. Only the disheveled ruin of his typically well-coiffed hair gives any indication of their recent passions. “We have a wonderful library at the Necropolis, a collection of every sort of tome and treatise imaginable.” He chuckles. “Not to mention some you likely can’t imagine, as we steadfast Watchers safeguard those banned books too dangerous even to contemplate! This library - the silence, the scent of parchment, the gathered potency of an immense repository of knowledge… It reminds me of a place where I have passed many a happy hour.”
He leans back, rests a tentative hand on her knee. It is a strange feeling, his hands on her not for healing or hunger but for the simple comfort of presence, and she laces her fingers through his and squeezes them tight.
“And what of you?” Emmrich’s eyes are wide, shining with the violet glow of the darkening night sky above. “Your friends, Treviso, the Shadow Dragons in Minrathous… Do you miss your home as well?”
She leans her head into his shoulder, breathing in the scent of him, incense and sandalwood and a hint of chamomile tea. She feels his muscles tense briefly beneath the touch; then he relaxes, and he wraps an arm around her and draws her against him.
“I left Treviso when I was nineteen, when my magic first started to show,” says Rook slowly. “And I live in Minrathous, but it’s never been home. I don’t…” She pauses. “I’m not sure I even have a home, not anymore. Here, well - I guess it’s not home, and -” she glances up, at the howling wolves and the magicked side tables and the cold runic lights - “I’d definitely decorate it differently if it was, but… at least I feel like I belong, here.” She nuzzles her cheek deeper into the starched shoulder of his shirt, feeling his chest rise and fall beneath it. She does not say “with you,” because it is early, and though she has faced down a dragon there are limits to even her bravery.
“Oh, Rook,” says Emmrich, in a voice warm enough to melt the icy fear encasing her heart.
“Skadi,” she murmurs into his shoulder, as exhaustion begins to drag down her bones, and she closes her eyes to the starry seas all around. “My name is Skadi.”