I am delighted every time I realize how much fic has come out of the last eight months-ish of finally falling in love with Dragon Age, so here's the chronological set of fics I've written thus far, all taking place in the same universe, with some bonus WIPs in the mix:
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Spilling Light Unearthly: [Rated T - 4700 words - Solavellan & ensemble]. After Crestwood, the Inquisition comes to the belated realization that at some point their leader must have simply walked out of Skyhold and vanished.
“Sure,” Bull said. “Hey, quick question. What exactly is the plan if the Inquisitor doesn’t come back?”
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(in progress - <10% complete) Untitled Post-Trespasser Fic [Rated M - aiming for around 30,000 words - Solavellan & ensemble]. Stunned and shaken even months after the Exalted Council, Lavellan has taken Varric up on his offer to move to Kirkwall. As All Soul's Day approaches and the city-state's politics start to churn, members of the old Inquisition are gathering to lend their support to the illustrious Viscount. But something shifts in dreams, a howl at the door, and Lavellan is coming untethered without an Anchor to hold her down.
“Oh,” Cassandra said, her cheeks reddening. “I’m sorry. I just-- does it still pain you?”
It was a reasonable question, Zephyr supposed. Cassandra had been there to hear it, the first few times the pain had broken through in camp at night or at Skyhold in some meeting with dignitaries. She’d been there at the end, when the screaming agony had finally refused to be contained and they’d all stopped pretending Zephyr was going to survive this. And then she’d been there in the impossible aftermath, hurrying up to the eluvian to see Zephyr cradled half-conscious in Bull’s arms, stunned and drifting and somehow still breathing.
“No,” Zephyr said shortly. “It doesn’t pain me anymore. Not in that way.”
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Death with Its Favorite Song [Rated T - 5500 words - pre-Rook/Lucanis, Harding]. Two days after his rescue from the Ossuary, Lucanis heads back to Treviso, trying to reconcile his torn-apart memories with the suppressed chaos of a city under occupation. Rook, for reasons beyond understanding, insists on tagging along.
The city was so close to correct that it felt like a dream.
In his torment, he’d mentally walked the streets of Treviso, darting down familiar alleys, lingering on rooftops, sipping coffee, watching gondolas carve through the inky blackness of the canals. It had been an easy escape, well within the realm of his experience and training, and he’d reveled in it. But as time had passed, as his lacerated mind had been stitched back together with the edges not quite meeting, he’d struggled to fill in gaps. The blocks leading up to Cafe Pietra had become a blur of starry skies and hushed voices, of warm spice and cool walls. The Diamond had seemed smaller and larger all at once: a smear of soft conversation, Teia’s amused smile, Viago’s piercing eyes. His grandmother’s face had wavered, shifting from gentle to stern, and Illario’s laugh had turned hard, mocking, until family had become just another way for Zara to torture him.
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A Place at the Table [Rated T - 5100 words - Rook/Lucanis, ensemble]. Five times Lucanis cooked for the team and one time they cooked for him. Covers the entire game's timeline. I may have been hungry while writing this one.
Caterina’s cooks would make huevos rotos when he asked, as a child, and would even let him peel and slice the potatoes when they realized the speed with which his clever fingers could work. He’d never let the knife slip, and they’d praised him for it, showering compliments on his thin shoulders that had leached through to muscle and bone.
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(in progress - 40% complete) Untitled Treviso Fic [Rated T - aiming for around 15,000 words, pre-Rook/Lucanis, Harding, Illario]. In the aftermath of Weisshaupt, Lucanis has disappeared back to Treviso without a word. Now Rook and Harding must follow his trail into the tumult of Crow politics after Caterina’s death... with Illario Dellamorte as their guide.
Illario laughed. “You don’t know him as well as I do. Ask me over a drink and I’ll tell you the story of how he got that Demon of Vyrantium nickname. That was not a subtle case. If I’d had my way, we would have been in and out and nobody the wiser.” But his jovial expression faded as quickly as it had come. “He’s always been... sensitive. He feels strongly, in ways an assassin can’t always afford to. And that makes him ruthless. Reckless. Cruel.”
“Uh-huh,” Rook said.
Illario’s distant gaze snapped back to her, the smile flickering once more to his face like a child’s clockwork toy being wound up. “If you haven’t seen it yet, you will.”
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Darkness Had No Need [Rated T - 10,000 words - Rook/Lucanis, ensemble]. The Lighthouse is sinking deeper into the Fade, its protective magic failing. To save the team, Rook, Lucanis, and Spite must embark on a risky journey into the space between islands... and must confront what they've become to each other.
At that, his face closed all at once like a book snapping shut. But his eyes, she thought, gave him away. For all his pretending at control, he’d never managed to hide the way he looked at her.
She took a step back, took a deep breath, and said, “Make the damn bridge, Spite.”
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The Thunder Breaks [Rated M - 4,100 words - Rook/Lucanis, Harding]. Injured in the battle with Ivenci after a fight riddled with clouds of qamek and phantom enemies, Rook notices both Harding and Lucanis acting strangely.
She gasps, drawing back, and feels something tear in her side with the sudden twist and turn. Another arrow skips across the stone of the wall next to her, and there’s a little flicker of red hair over on the far side of the Library, and then Harding is gone and Rook is pelting after her, sprinting out into the open courtyard.
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(in progress - 100% complete, should be posted soon) The Lily and the Raven [Rated T - 8,300 words - Bellara, Rook/Lucanis]. Bellara, Rook, and Lucanis get a request from Strife to venture into Arlathan Forest to rescue a team of Veil Jumpers who’ve vanished under mysterious circumstances. The mission begins like any other: an enemy, a puzzle, a rescue. But if there’s one thing Bellara’s learned in her writing, it’s that happy endings must be earned. Scratch it out. Begin again.
The Lily and the Raven, Bellara writes, and sits back, beaming at the words on the page. It’s a good title, she thinks. Intriguing. Compelling. A… a third thing, a word to finish out the thought that also ends in ‘-ing’. Um. She’ll get back to that.
Anyway, speaking of words ending in ‘-ing’, she needs a beginning. There are a few scenes she knows she wants to hit along the way, and it’s unfair, really, that she can’t just throw them all up on the paper in whatever order she likes. Unless that’s actually very experimental and extremely literary of her?
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The Enigma of the Mysterious Gifts [Rated G - 2,200 words - Neve, ensemble]. When everyone at the Lighthouse receives thoughtful presents out of nowhere, speculation abounds as to who the gift-giver might be. Neve is, as always, on the case.
From the moment she walked into my office, I knew she’d be trouble.
She exuded the kind of home-grown wholesomeness you got when you grew up too close to farms and paddocks, but she had a charming head of curls and a wicked glint in her eyes, and she knew how to use both to her advantage. “Neve,” she said. “You’re narrating mentally again. I can see it in your eyes.”
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How the Light Gets In [Rated E - 70,000 words - Rook/Lucanis, ensemble]. Defeating blighted gods should have led to a well-deserved retirement. Instead, a botched assassination attempt on the First Talon throws Rook and Lucanis into a maelstrom of secrets, mysteries, and danger, even as Spite's behavior becomes increasingly erratic.
The upper chambers of the Cantori Diamond were quieter than usual as she approached, even for the early hour, but she knew better than to mistake the silence for anything other than wariness heightened to paranoia. She had no doubt there had been eyes on her from the moment she’d stepped through the eluvian, and for every shadow she caught from the corner of her eye, there were doubtless a dozen more she couldn’t see. Treviso had circled a ring of blades around its wounded First Talon. Rook couldn’t help but feel on the wrong end of them.
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(in progress - 80% complete) As Sings the Lark [Rated E - aiming for 150,000 words - Rook/Lucanis, ensemble].
Two months ago, the eluvians mysteriously went dark. Since then, Rook and Lucanis have been trapped in Antiva and have settled uneasily into life among the Crows. Faced with an unexpected death, a contract that hits too close to home, and a new recurring nightmare, they must try to survive the wars that have been raging, unseen, behind their backs.
All the while, something strange and impossibly ancient has been awakening in the space between mirrors. Something of rope, something of chain, something of blade.
It has plans.
“Hope is the thing that hollows you out,” she said. “It’s what eats your insides and leaves you brittle, so the first cruel touch shatters you. You can let it in, but not before building it a stronger home. Not before letting the stronger scar tissue crowd out the thinner skin.”
“That’s a cage.” He breathed slowly, feeling his heart pounding in time with the thrumming of Spite’s banking rage. “You’re talking about building a cage. But hope doesn’t live in a cage. It opens doors."
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Fic: The Thunder Breaks [4,100 words | Rated M | Rook/Lucanis, Harding, Spite]
Many, many thanks to @loquaciousquark for the beta read on this! (And of course to her, @silksieve, and @fistfulofgammarays, who all put up with me flailing about writing while we were on vacation together!)
Title: The Thunder Breaks
Fandom: Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Characters/Pairings: Rook/Lucanis, Harding, Spite
Rating: M
Summary:
Injured in the battle with Ivenci after a fight riddled with clouds of qamek and phantom enemies, Rook notices both Harding and Lucanis acting strangely.
Read on AO3
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She wakes tasting bitterness on her tongue.
Long training keeps her lying still, keeps her breathing slow until she can work out where she is and what’s happened. But there’s a catch in that breathing, a little blossoming of pain in her ribs, and she remembers Ivenci, too fast and too silent in the clouds of green. Remembers a little knife in their sleeve. Then, more confused, she remembers Harding drawing on her, eyes wide and pupils blown, and Lucanis muttering to Spite, swinging at shadows, at nightmares.
But she’d come back at Ivenci, hit them hard. The give of their solid flesh under heavy cloth had been undeniably real as they’d fallen to her blades.
So she opens her eyes, pushes shakily to her feet. Knife’s been yanked out of her side, blood’s tacky against her armor, but there’s none of the vertiginous free-fall of dangerous blood loss, so she’s got some time yet. Ivenci’s on the ground a small distance away, crouched with hands above their head in long-overdue surrender. Green clouds have dissipated, although both Harding and Lucanis look a little dazed, standing in the courtyard with weapons drawn. No more flailing around at ghosts, though.
“We all right?” Rook calls, and both of them jump at her voice; Harding’s drawn arrow wobbles and weaves in Rook’s general direction before she takes a visible breath and lowers it. Lucanis looks distant, disturbed; she hadn’t wanted mages in this fight with the risk of qamek making an appearance, but he’d been insistent that Spite would likely be unaffected. Foolish chance to take, but she hadn’t felt like she could say no, which was also foolish for a host of different reasons she was still coming to terms with.
No verbal confirmation from the others, so she says with a little more volume, “We all right?”
“Yes,” Harding says, sharp. She shakes her head, blinking rapidly. “Yes, Rook. Sorry.”
“We’re fine,” Lucanis says. He’s being sardonic, she decides, and most of that edge is the aftermath of fear rather than pain or immediate distress. He murmurs something under his breath, though, and what does she know, really?
“Good,” she says, and then Jacobus is racing in and everything starts moving again, but she can’t shake a premonition of an arrow between her shoulders, a blade through her spine.
---
They talk to Jacobus, and then they talk to Teia and Viago, and then they step back through the eluvian, just the three of them at last.
“What was that?” Harding asks once they’re safely through to the Crossroads. Rook dawdles, wanting them both ahead of her where she can keep an eye on them, but Harding’s the consummate scout and keeps doubling back to watch their flanks. “I mean, I know it was qamek of some sort, but that was… scrambling. I feel like there weren’t nearly enough bodies in that courtyard?”
“Lots of those Antaam weren’t real, I think,” Rook says.
“Real enough to fool Spite,” Lucanis says darkly. Probably pondering some Crow code about killing something that isn’t actually corporeal. She hangs back again to watch him, but he only falls into step beside her, and then she has to swallow the urge to grab him by the hand. They’re… trying this, certainly. But it’s also been new for both of them in so many different ways, and outside a handful of very pleasant actions taken in the heat of various moments it’s been irritatingly difficult to initiate anything. And she absolutely has to be the one to initiate: if she left it all to him, she has a sinking feeling he’d never touch her again out of sheer noble-minded self-deprivation. The man is determined to die of thirst while staring at a freshly brewed pot of Andoral’s Breath.
She settles for bumping his shoulder with hers. He glances over, a question in his eyes, and she deflates with a little shrug. She’d been good at flirting once, surely. “Is Spite all right?” she asks, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.
“Fine,” he says, but again he follows it up with something she can’t quite hear, something inward-directed and waspish.
“Stay sharp,” Harding says, her voice edged, but when Rook glances back she’s only walking a few paces behind, rolling out her shoulders, entirely at ease.
“You’re hurt,” Lucanis says, drawing her attention back. “Spite can smell the blood.”
“In a friendly way or in a distressingly peckish way?”
“Rook,” Lucanis says. They’re all tired and out of sorts, but she’s been reliably able to trade weak quips for weaker smiles since she’s known him. Now he only stares at her, hard and unamused.
“I’m all right,” she says. She’d forgotten about the knife wound, but now that he’s mentioned it she can’t help noticing the dried-blood tackiness of her under-armor padding pulling against her skin with each step. And she’s annoyed, really, that he’s taking this tone with her at all. “I know what I’m doing, Lucanis. I’m not about to keel over, or I’d have taken a potion.”
“I know that,” he says, and the faintly wounded confusion on his face is even more irritating, so she gives up on trying to watch the others from behind and storms a few paces ahead. At least when they’d first explored the Crossroads, she could rely on some of the gods’ cronies showing up for a quick fight to clear her head. Now it’s just a quiet slog the rest of the way home.
Lucanis says something to Harding behind her as they board the Caretaker’s boat. Maybe that’s just as well. Complaining about the leader is a time-honored tradition, good for bonding. If it’s this new dynamic that’s upsetting them both, a little bit of grumbling might be just what’s needed. She’d dealt with that as she’d slowly become more senior among the Veil Jumpers—admittedly more because of their exceptionally high attrition rate than for reasons of merit. She knows full well that her habit of tumbling into the occasional physical entanglement gets awkward when it comes time to give orders.
This is a transition period, she thinks as she glances over her shoulder to see Lucanis and Harding both watching her intently from behind. But a transition into what?
---
She begs off to her quarters to rest after a quick debrief with the team about the situation in Treviso, and closing the door on the Library behind her feels like shutting out the rest of the world. Then she sinks onto the chaise lounge and presses her face in her hands, rubbing at her aching temples. Her head hurts. Her side hurts where fucking Ivenci got their knife in, and she probably needs to deal with that. Feels like it’s still bleeding, anyway, which probably means an embrium potion and a long nap at best and a sheepish visit to Emmrich or Bellara at worst.
Stripping off her armor is a long process even under ideal circumstances, and some of those phantom Antaam weapons had been real enough to ding and dent her armor in just such a way as to make some of the buckles difficult to unclasp. She’ll have to take a stab at reshaping parts of the breastplate, she thinks with distaste, but she’s been Varric’s protégée for too long not to know the utter necessity of keeping her kit in good order.
Drawing off the breastplate also means confronting the sheer quantity of blood stuck to her side, which is far from encouraging. Shrugging out of the top of her leather under-armor frankly stings, and she feels a fresh well of warmth down her side as the little wound oozes out more blood.
There’s a knock at her door. Too loud for a knock, really. A pounding. “Rook!” Harding yells, and there’s a strange, high note of rage in her voice that sends cold fear down Rook’s spine. “You need to get out here!”
“Harding?” Rook moves to the door, but dread is crawling in her skull, dread is opening fingers to encircle her, surround her, and her heart is certainly slamming like something against the bars of a cage. She pauses just short of opening it, shivering, and calls through the door, “What’s going on out there?”
Silence. She’s gathering the nerve to push the door open when another knock slams against it, too-loud, and she jolts back a step, belatedly scrabbling for one of the knives at her belt. “Harding?”
Lucanis’s voice, a little uncertain. “Rook? Are you all right?”
She swings the door open, fist clenched on the hilt of her blade, to see Lucanis standing alone in the doorway, a small plate of meats and cheeses in hand. He takes in her state of half-dress quickly, his eyes lingering with aggravatingly honorable brevity on her breastband before darting to the blood at her side. “Haciedor, Rook, you need to let someone take a look at that. Are you still bleeding?”
She’s breathing fast, trying to get her fingers to relax on her weapon, keeping it out of sight half-behind her back. “Is Harding out there?”
Lucanis reaches a hand toward her, then seems to think better of it and grasps the doorframe instead. “Here? No. I think she’s gone back to her room.”
Which doesn’t make sense; she knows what she heard. But he’d also been in the qamek smoke, the stuff that created illusions and built a whole Antaam army in their heads. She thinks she sees a little twitch at the corner of his eye that wasn’t there before. And he’s muttering to Spite again, which isn’t normal. Not like this. Not in front of her, like she’s a stranger. “Are you all right, Lucanis?”
He stares at her. “I’m not the one leaving blood all over the floor.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I was about to take a potion and get some rest when you interrupted.”
“Oh,” he says. “I thought—well, never mind what I thought.” He straightens, brandishing the plate of meats and cheeses like it’s a talisman. “Something to eat?”
If he is still compromised by the qamek, Rook thinks, there could be anything in that food. “I’ll come by later,” she says. “Go get some rest.”
She expects him to make a wry comment about practicing what she preaches, or maybe even something a little suggestive about the kinds of commands she could be giving him, but he only looks at her for a moment, then turns and stalks off. And she sees, before he turns, a flare of violet light in his eyes.
---
In the end, she decides to go to Emmrich’s room for a more powerful dose of healing magic, only to find it empty when she knocks. She wants to ask him what he knows about qamek, or saar-qamek, or whatever variety of qamek it was that Ivenci had at their disposal. She wants someone else to know what’s going on, to be able to watch Harding and Lucanis. Maybe he’s visiting Bellara; the two of them have been thick as thieves lately, putting together some sort of scientific journal article about resonant systems.
She turns from the silent door just in time for an arrow to miss her face by inches, thudding into the wood behind her.
She gasps, drawing back, and feels something tear in her side with the sudden twist and turn. Another arrow skips across the stone of the wall next to her, and there’s a little flicker of red hair over on the far side of the Library, and then Harding is gone and Rook is pelting after her, sprinting out into the open courtyard.
The bright light outside is disorienting, and she stumbles for a moment, clutching at her side and gasping for breath. She’d pulled her underarmor back up before leaving her room, but without a breastplate she feels downright naked, exposed. Her fingers come away from her side wet with red, and she knows the yawning chasm of blood loss for what it is when she turns her head and the world keeps turning a moment too long. She staggers against the wall of the Lighthouse, but she can’t see Harding. She can’t—
“Rook?”
Lucanis is calling from the far side of the courtyard, and she can see the moment he curses and starts to run. Is there a blade in his hand? His eyes are glowing, glowing, and there’s something so horribly wrong with all of this.
She turns and sprints up the stairs along the side of the Lighthouse, feeling her heartbeat in her side, in her ears, and clambers up the last few practically on all fours in her haste. She hears voices, up at the top. Bellara, Emmrich.
Behind her, Lucanis is shouting her name again. Her shoulderblades itch in anticipation of that first blade.
Emmrich turns when she stumbles up, Bel reaches out a hand to catch her, but their faces are wrong, their expressions are furious, frightening, and something sparks to life around them, some wrong magic, some horrific power she doesn’t understand. She shoves back, gasping, and draws her rapier, and then Bel’s saying something terrible, some sort of threat, and Emmrich is chanting something, and how in the Maker’s name has the qamek made it here, made it to them?
“Rook,” says Lucanis from the top of the stairs, and he’s advancing on her slowly with a knife in his hand and wings crackling at his back, but one hand is out, reaching, and his voice is gentle despite the rage in his eyes. “Rook, can you hear me? What are you seeing?”
She lunges at him, swinging wildly to keep him at bay, and nearly overbalances herself right off the edge of the balcony when the world tilts and swings. He curses, stepping with effortless grace inside her guard and pushing the rapier aside, so she swipes with her main-gauche dagger, a wild jab that nearly catches him in the gut. But he grabs her wrist and twists, not painfully, and the knife drops from suddenly nerveless fingers.
She sways, and he catches her when her knees buckle, lowering her to the ground with surprising gentleness. “Rook, look at me. You’re safe. Nobody here is trying to hurt you. I think you are still feeling the qamek—you got a stronger dose than the rest of us. Whatever you’re seeing, please just listen to what I’m saying.”
His voice is a soothing litany, but his eyes are terrifying, and there’s a knife in his hand coming for her throat, so she jerks her fist up and manages, quite to her surprise, to connect firmly with his nose. He releases her with a gasp, and she rolls onto her stomach, trying to scramble away from him, but her legs aren’t working right, and her head slams down to the ground, and the world is spinning so fast she can only dig her fingers into the stone below her and hang on.
“Rook,” says Lucanis, his voice a little muffled by a bloodied nose. He’s looking beyond her, signalling something to Bel and Emmrich, and then he’s huddled over her, one hand grasping for a hold between her shoulders, the other shifting down to her side. A moment later, he’s applying pressure directly to the wound and she’s fighting him again, gasping, clawing, but trying to connect with him is like swimming through molasses, and she’s shaking so badly. “Just hold on,” he says. He sounds scared, she thinks with a sort of detached confusion. “Breathe, Rook.” And he’s grabbed her by the shoulders, but he’s just holding her in place, and surely he could have killed her a dozen times over by now.
She turns to meet his eyes, sees them wide and worried beyond the smear of blood under his nose. Hears the catch in his breath, feels the heat of his hand fumbling to press something into the wound again. “Trust me,” he says. “Rook, please trust me. You’re safe.”
It’s a physical effort to relax her tensed muscles, all at once, and when she does there’s a roaring in her ears and a slow tunneling of her vision. Lucanis’s voice, sharp. “I don’t think she’s breathing.” A soft touch at her cheek, the herbal green warmth of healing magic coursing through her veins, and his eyes follow her into the dark, at turns gentle and malevolent, but always watching. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She sinks.
---
She wakes on the chaise lounge with a blanket pulled up to her chin and a head that feels like a sack full of stones. But there’s a hand in hers, and so she takes a moment to inspect it, turning it over to trace the fine lines of scars, the length of the thick, square fingers, the fine dusting of dark hair across the back.
“Hello,” says Lucanis, who as it happens is sitting on the floor beside her chaise, and in his voice is relief and more than a little amusement as she continues her examination.
“You have very nice hands,” she says, then exhales slowly. “Maker’s breath. That was… unpleasant.”
“You lost a lot of blood,” he says. “The qamek was making you see things—I lost track of you in the fight, but when Ivenci hurt you, they must have managed to dose you again. I should have noticed sooner that you weren’t yourself, Rook. I’m sorry.”
“I think I might have more to apologize for, actually.” She draws her hand away from his to cup the side of his face. “How’s your nose?”
He hums amusement; there’s no sign of a bruise, so he must have opted for some of the magical healing on offer. “Perfectly fine, apart from my embarrassment at failing to dodge a cheap shot I should have seen coming. I’d forgotten how quick you are.”
She can’t resist, brushes her fingers against his lips just to watch the way his focus shifts, his eyes suddenly sharp and intent on hers. “And I take it Harding hasn’t actually been firing arrows at me and sprinting across the courtyard in villainous fashion?”
“Harding had a headache and went straight to bed after we got back. Slept it off and missed all the excitement.” Then Spite’s voice bleeds through, gleeful. “We swapped your skin.”
She tries to parse that in a way that isn’t deeply alarming and comes up short. “All right?”
She’s delighted to discover that Lucanis can blush a little, a faint redness that creeps from the tips of his ears along the bridge of his nose. “I changed your clothing, after,” he says. “Cleaned up what was left of the wound. Not, ah... I left the smallclothes. I hope that’s all right.”
She realizes, belatedly, that she’s only wearing a sleep shirt beneath the blanket, and wonders how high Bel’s eyebrows had gone when Lucanis had offered to do that. “Completely fine,” she says quickly, to put them both out of the misery of his uncomfortable expression, and wonders if they’re going to do every single part of this thing backwards. Oh, they’d certainly kissed several times, warm and lingering or quick and desperate, but beyond that they’d been approximately as amorous as a couple of passing acquaintances. Well. There had been the one memorable occasion when he’d pressed her into the wall of the dining room and their hands had wandered more deliberately, but even that had ended with the rest of the team walking in and the two of them springing apart, tragically still fully clothed. She’d certainly been hoping for more from that evening than settling awkwardly into what had proven to be a dinner of deep physical discomfort and a sheepish dispersal to their respective quarters.
Now she chuckles at his questioning look. “Sorry. Just thinking that stripping off my clothes and putting me to bed feels like a new step in all this.”
She expects him to deflect, to back away yet again, but he only presses his lips to hers and says, “If the thought appeals, I think I would quite like to add it to my evening routine. Although perhaps without the blood.”
She sighs against him, sinking into the kiss, then jumps when his hand slips beneath her blanket, his fingers spreading against her belly. He pauses at her reaction, but she only laughs. “Your hand is cold.”
“Then,” he says, and his fingers slip beneath the waist of her smallclothes, “I suppose I had better warm it up.”
For all his confident words, there’s a little quaver to his voice, and when he brings her to the brink, it’s with a studied, almost solemn concentration. But at the last moment he kisses her, all passion, and she feels him shivering as she digs fingers into his hair, as she moans into his mouth.
After, he sinks back to rest his chin on his arm, staring at her from the floor while he traces fingers against her thigh, and she thinks, a little dazed, that she should probably look into getting them a bigger bed. “Good?” he asks.
“Desperately.” She reaches to comb a hand back through his hair. “I’m sorry it took me so long to believe you,” she says.
He smiles crookedly. “The qamek was affecting your mind, Rook. Apart from some mild dizzy spells that may linger for a few more days, Emmrich and Bellara are convinced you will make a full recovery.”
“Good to know I don’t need to scramble around the Lighthouse fighting the whole team.” Although, she thinks ruefully, the whole lot of them together would likely take her down before she managed the first step outside her room. “And anyway, that’s not what I mean. I... I mean that I’m sorry it took me so long to believe you when you said you wanted... I mean, when we...” She laughs, a little higher-pitched than she’d like, and presses the heel of her hand to her forehead. “Well, there’s one of those dizzy spells they mentioned.”
Lucanis’s expression fades into something a little more inward, a little more distant. “Rook,” he says. “I am serious about this. About us.” His lips quirk up again into that lopsided smile. “Spite insists that I am too serious about most things. But I am sorry if I made you believe I wasn’t. I wanted to give you time and space to consider. To be sure. When you hadn’t told the team, I didn’t know if...”
On a whim, she tightens her grip on his hair, just for a moment, and he lets out his breath in a slow sigh, his eyes never leaving hers. Another kind of freefall, she thinks, vertiginous even without the blood loss. “Believe me, I’m sure,” she says. “And you’re right. We should tell the team, so it doesn’t feel so much like... like sneaking around.”
“Maybe it can feel a little like sneaking around,” Lucanis says, eyes flashing amusement. “In any case, Harding figured it out from day one, so I’m sure the others know. But it would be nice to say it more officially”
“This is new for me,” she says, and feels a little flare of annoyance at her need to explain, to over-explain. To make excuses. But he’s just watching her, and something in those eyes makes her want to tell him every thought that comes into her head. “All of this. Last time I wanted to be serious about a relationship, I was seventeen and trying to convince myself I was going to marry the stablehand I’d been dating since I was fifteen. That was half a lifetime ago.”
Lucanis raises an eyebrow and lowers his voice to an appropriately dramatic tone, the ass. “Sounds serious. Is this stablehand the jealous type? Do I need to fear assassins in the night?”
Rook pats his cheek with an open hand; he captures it to kiss the palm. “We were kids, and he turned out to be a lout. Besides, I’m coming to realize assassins in the night have many charms to recommend them.” That makes him light up, a smug little expression that drags a smile to her own lips, unbidden. The dizziness is fading, but in its wake her limbs are heavy and her eyelids are drooping. She can hear her own voice thickening, slurring with exhaustion. “Just... just please promise you’ll talk to me, Lucanis. You’ll tell me if something’s wrong. You’ll be there when I wake up.”
“I will be here as long as you need,” he says with a mild matter-of-factness that feels more binding, somehow, than an intense declaration.
She lets her eyes drift shut to the sound of his soft, even breathing, and trusts him to watch her back until morning.
Fic: The Thunder Breaks [4,100 words | Rated M | Rook/Lucanis, Harding, Spite]
Many, many thanks to @loquaciousquark for the beta read on this! (And of course to her, @silksieve, and @fistfulofgammarays, who all put up with me flailing about writing while we were on vacation together!)
Title: The Thunder Breaks
Fandom: Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Characters/Pairings: Rook/Lucanis, Harding, Spite
Rating: M
Summary:
Injured in the battle with Ivenci after a fight riddled with clouds of qamek and phantom enemies, Rook notices both Harding and Lucanis acting strangely.
Read on AO3
---
She wakes tasting bitterness on her tongue.
Long training keeps her lying still, keeps her breathing slow until she can work out where she is and what’s happened. But there’s a catch in that breathing, a little blossoming of pain in her ribs, and she remembers Ivenci, too fast and too silent in the clouds of green. Remembers a little knife in their sleeve. Then, more confused, she remembers Harding drawing on her, eyes wide and pupils blown, and Lucanis muttering to Spite, swinging at shadows, at nightmares.
But she’d come back at Ivenci, hit them hard. The give of their solid flesh under heavy cloth had been undeniably real as they’d fallen to her blades.
So she opens her eyes, pushes shakily to her feet. Knife’s been yanked out of her side, blood’s tacky against her armor, but there’s none of the vertiginous free-fall of dangerous blood loss, so she’s got some time yet. Ivenci’s on the ground a small distance away, crouched with hands above their head in long-overdue surrender. Green clouds have dissipated, although both Harding and Lucanis look a little dazed, standing in the courtyard with weapons drawn. No more flailing around at ghosts, though.
“We all right?” Rook calls, and both of them jump at her voice; Harding’s drawn arrow wobbles and weaves in Rook’s general direction before she takes a visible breath and lowers it. Lucanis looks distant, disturbed; she hadn’t wanted mages in this fight with the risk of qamek making an appearance, but he’d been insistent that Spite would likely be unaffected. Foolish chance to take, but she hadn’t felt like she could say no, which was also foolish for a host of different reasons she was still coming to terms with.
No verbal confirmation from the others, so she says with a little more volume, “We all right?”
“Yes,” Harding says, sharp. She shakes her head, blinking rapidly. “Yes, Rook. Sorry.”
“We’re fine,” Lucanis says. He’s being sardonic, she decides, and most of that edge is the aftermath of fear rather than pain or immediate distress. He murmurs something under his breath, though, and what does she know, really?
“Good,” she says, and then Jacobus is racing in and everything starts moving again, but she can’t shake a premonition of an arrow between her shoulders, a blade through her spine.
---
They talk to Jacobus, and then they talk to Teia and Viago, and then they step back through the eluvian, just the three of them at last.
“What was that?” Harding asks once they’re safely through to the Crossroads. Rook dawdles, wanting them both ahead of her where she can keep an eye on them, but Harding’s the consummate scout and keeps doubling back to watch their flanks. “I mean, I know it was qamek of some sort, but that was… scrambling. I feel like there weren’t nearly enough bodies in that courtyard?”
“Lots of those Antaam weren’t real, I think,” Rook says.
“Real enough to fool Spite,” Lucanis says darkly. Probably pondering some Crow code about killing something that isn’t actually corporeal. She hangs back again to watch him, but he only falls into step beside her, and then she has to swallow the urge to grab him by the hand. They’re… trying this, certainly. But it’s also been new for both of them in so many different ways, and outside a handful of very pleasant actions taken in the heat of various moments it’s been irritatingly difficult to initiate anything. And she absolutely has to be the one to initiate: if she left it all to him, she has a sinking feeling he’d never touch her again out of sheer noble-minded self-deprivation. The man is determined to die of thirst while staring at a freshly brewed pot of Andoral’s Breath.
She settles for bumping his shoulder with hers. He glances over, a question in his eyes, and she deflates with a little shrug. She’d been good at flirting once, surely. “Is Spite all right?” she asks, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.
“Fine,” he says, but again he follows it up with something she can’t quite hear, something inward-directed and waspish.
“Stay sharp,” Harding says, her voice edged, but when Rook glances back she’s only walking a few paces behind, rolling out her shoulders, entirely at ease.
“You’re hurt,” Lucanis says, drawing her attention back. “Spite can smell the blood.”
“In a friendly way or in a distressingly peckish way?”
“Rook,” Lucanis says. They’re all tired and out of sorts, but she’s been reliably able to trade weak quips for weaker smiles since she’s known him. Now he only stares at her, hard and unamused.
“I’m all right,” she says. She’d forgotten about the knife wound, but now that he’s mentioned it she can’t help noticing the dried-blood tackiness of her under-armor padding pulling against her skin with each step. And she’s annoyed, really, that he’s taking this tone with her at all. “I know what I’m doing, Lucanis. I’m not about to keel over, or I’d have taken a potion.”
“I know that,” he says, and the faintly wounded confusion on his face is even more irritating, so she gives up on trying to watch the others from behind and storms a few paces ahead. At least when they’d first explored the Crossroads, she could rely on some of the gods’ cronies showing up for a quick fight to clear her head. Now it’s just a quiet slog the rest of the way home.
Lucanis says something to Harding behind her as they board the Caretaker’s boat. Maybe that’s just as well. Complaining about the leader is a time-honored tradition, good for bonding. If it’s this new dynamic that’s upsetting them both, a little bit of grumbling might be just what’s needed. She’d dealt with that as she’d slowly become more senior among the Veil Jumpers—admittedly more because of their exceptionally high attrition rate than for reasons of merit. She knows full well that her habit of tumbling into the occasional physical entanglement gets awkward when it comes time to give orders.
This is a transition period, she thinks as she glances over her shoulder to see Lucanis and Harding both watching her intently from behind. But a transition into what?
---
She begs off to her quarters to rest after a quick debrief with the team about the situation in Treviso, and closing the door on the Library behind her feels like shutting out the rest of the world. Then she sinks onto the chaise lounge and presses her face in her hands, rubbing at her aching temples. Her head hurts. Her side hurts where fucking Ivenci got their knife in, and she probably needs to deal with that. Feels like it’s still bleeding, anyway, which probably means an embrium potion and a long nap at best and a sheepish visit to Emmrich or Bellara at worst.
Stripping off her armor is a long process even under ideal circumstances, and some of those phantom Antaam weapons had been real enough to ding and dent her armor in just such a way as to make some of the buckles difficult to unclasp. She’ll have to take a stab at reshaping parts of the breastplate, she thinks with distaste, but she’s been Varric’s protégée for too long not to know the utter necessity of keeping her kit in good order.
Drawing off the breastplate also means confronting the sheer quantity of blood stuck to her side, which is far from encouraging. Shrugging out of the top of her leather under-armor frankly stings, and she feels a fresh well of warmth down her side as the little wound oozes out more blood.
There’s a knock at her door. Too loud for a knock, really. A pounding. “Rook!” Harding yells, and there’s a strange, high note of rage in her voice that sends cold fear down Rook’s spine. “You need to get out here!”
“Harding?” Rook moves to the door, but dread is crawling in her skull, dread is opening fingers to encircle her, surround her, and her heart is certainly slamming like something against the bars of a cage. She pauses just short of opening it, shivering, and calls through the door, “What’s going on out there?”
Silence. She’s gathering the nerve to push the door open when another knock slams against it, too-loud, and she jolts back a step, belatedly scrabbling for one of the knives at her belt. “Harding?”
Lucanis’s voice, a little uncertain. “Rook? Are you all right?”
She swings the door open, fist clenched on the hilt of her blade, to see Lucanis standing alone in the doorway, a small plate of meats and cheeses in hand. He takes in her state of half-dress quickly, his eyes lingering with aggravatingly honorable brevity on her breastband before darting to the blood at her side. “Haciedor, Rook, you need to let someone take a look at that. Are you still bleeding?”
She’s breathing fast, trying to get her fingers to relax on her weapon, keeping it out of sight half-behind her back. “Is Harding out there?”
Lucanis reaches a hand toward her, then seems to think better of it and grasps the doorframe instead. “Here? No. I think she’s gone back to her room.”
Which doesn’t make sense; she knows what she heard. But he’d also been in the qamek smoke, the stuff that created illusions and built a whole Antaam army in their heads. She thinks she sees a little twitch at the corner of his eye that wasn’t there before. And he’s muttering to Spite again, which isn’t normal. Not like this. Not in front of her, like she’s a stranger. “Are you all right, Lucanis?”
He stares at her. “I’m not the one leaving blood all over the floor.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I was about to take a potion and get some rest when you interrupted.”
“Oh,” he says. “I thought—well, never mind what I thought.” He straightens, brandishing the plate of meats and cheeses like it’s a talisman. “Something to eat?”
If he is still compromised by the qamek, Rook thinks, there could be anything in that food. “I’ll come by later,” she says. “Go get some rest.”
She expects him to make a wry comment about practicing what she preaches, or maybe even something a little suggestive about the kinds of commands she could be giving him, but he only looks at her for a moment, then turns and stalks off. And she sees, before he turns, a flare of violet light in his eyes.
---
In the end, she decides to go to Emmrich’s room for a more powerful dose of healing magic, only to find it empty when she knocks. She wants to ask him what he knows about qamek, or saar-qamek, or whatever variety of qamek it was that Ivenci had at their disposal. She wants someone else to know what’s going on, to be able to watch Harding and Lucanis. Maybe he’s visiting Bellara; the two of them have been thick as thieves lately, putting together some sort of scientific journal article about resonant systems.
She turns from the silent door just in time for an arrow to miss her face by inches, thudding into the wood behind her.
She gasps, drawing back, and feels something tear in her side with the sudden twist and turn. Another arrow skips across the stone of the wall next to her, and there’s a little flicker of red hair over on the far side of the Library, and then Harding is gone and Rook is pelting after her, sprinting out into the open courtyard.
The bright light outside is disorienting, and she stumbles for a moment, clutching at her side and gasping for breath. She’d pulled her underarmor back up before leaving her room, but without a breastplate she feels downright naked, exposed. Her fingers come away from her side wet with red, and she knows the yawning chasm of blood loss for what it is when she turns her head and the world keeps turning a moment too long. She staggers against the wall of the Lighthouse, but she can’t see Harding. She can’t—
“Rook?”
Lucanis is calling from the far side of the courtyard, and she can see the moment he curses and starts to run. Is there a blade in his hand? His eyes are glowing, glowing, and there’s something so horribly wrong with all of this.
She turns and sprints up the stairs along the side of the Lighthouse, feeling her heartbeat in her side, in her ears, and clambers up the last few practically on all fours in her haste. She hears voices, up at the top. Bellara, Emmrich.
Behind her, Lucanis is shouting her name again. Her shoulderblades itch in anticipation of that first blade.
Emmrich turns when she stumbles up, Bel reaches out a hand to catch her, but their faces are wrong, their expressions are furious, frightening, and something sparks to life around them, some wrong magic, some horrific power she doesn’t understand. She shoves back, gasping, and draws her rapier, and then Bel’s saying something terrible, some sort of threat, and Emmrich is chanting something, and how in the Maker’s name has the qamek made it here, made it to them?
“Rook,” says Lucanis from the top of the stairs, and he’s advancing on her slowly with a knife in his hand and wings crackling at his back, but one hand is out, reaching, and his voice is gentle despite the rage in his eyes. “Rook, can you hear me? What are you seeing?”
She lunges at him, swinging wildly to keep him at bay, and nearly overbalances herself right off the edge of the balcony when the world tilts and swings. He curses, stepping with effortless grace inside her guard and pushing the rapier aside, so she swipes with her main-gauche dagger, a wild jab that nearly catches him in the gut. But he grabs her wrist and twists, not painfully, and the knife drops from suddenly nerveless fingers.
She sways, and he catches her when her knees buckle, lowering her to the ground with surprising gentleness. “Rook, look at me. You’re safe. Nobody here is trying to hurt you. I think you are still feeling the qamek—you got a stronger dose than the rest of us. Whatever you’re seeing, please just listen to what I’m saying.”
His voice is a soothing litany, but his eyes are terrifying, and there’s a knife in his hand coming for her throat, so she jerks her fist up and manages, quite to her surprise, to connect firmly with his nose. He releases her with a gasp, and she rolls onto her stomach, trying to scramble away from him, but her legs aren’t working right, and her head slams down to the ground, and the world is spinning so fast she can only dig her fingers into the stone below her and hang on.
“Rook,” says Lucanis, his voice a little muffled by a bloodied nose. He’s looking beyond her, signalling something to Bel and Emmrich, and then he’s huddled over her, one hand grasping for a hold between her shoulders, the other shifting down to her side. A moment later, he’s applying pressure directly to the wound and she’s fighting him again, gasping, clawing, but trying to connect with him is like swimming through molasses, and she’s shaking so badly. “Just hold on,” he says. He sounds scared, she thinks with a sort of detached confusion. “Breathe, Rook.” And he’s grabbed her by the shoulders, but he’s just holding her in place, and surely he could have killed her a dozen times over by now.
She turns to meet his eyes, sees them wide and worried beyond the smear of blood under his nose. Hears the catch in his breath, feels the heat of his hand fumbling to press something into the wound again. “Trust me,” he says. “Rook, please trust me. You’re safe.”
It’s a physical effort to relax her tensed muscles, all at once, and when she does there’s a roaring in her ears and a slow tunneling of her vision. Lucanis’s voice, sharp. “I don’t think she’s breathing.” A soft touch at her cheek, the herbal green warmth of healing magic coursing through her veins, and his eyes follow her into the dark, at turns gentle and malevolent, but always watching. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She sinks.
---
She wakes on the chaise lounge with a blanket pulled up to her chin and a head that feels like a sack full of stones. But there’s a hand in hers, and so she takes a moment to inspect it, turning it over to trace the fine lines of scars, the length of the thick, square fingers, the fine dusting of dark hair across the back.
“Hello,” says Lucanis, who as it happens is sitting on the floor beside her chaise, and in his voice is relief and more than a little amusement as she continues her examination.
“You have very nice hands,” she says, then exhales slowly. “Maker’s breath. That was… unpleasant.”
“You lost a lot of blood,” he says. “The qamek was making you see things—I lost track of you in the fight, but when Ivenci hurt you, they must have managed to dose you again. I should have noticed sooner that you weren’t yourself, Rook. I’m sorry.”
“I think I might have more to apologize for, actually.” She draws her hand away from his to cup the side of his face. “How’s your nose?”
He hums amusement; there’s no sign of a bruise, so he must have opted for some of the magical healing on offer. “Perfectly fine, apart from my embarrassment at failing to dodge a cheap shot I should have seen coming. I’d forgotten how quick you are.”
She can’t resist, brushes her fingers against his lips just to watch the way his focus shifts, his eyes suddenly sharp and intent on hers. “And I take it Harding hasn’t actually been firing arrows at me and sprinting across the courtyard in villainous fashion?”
“Harding had a headache and went straight to bed after we got back. Slept it off and missed all the excitement.” Then Spite’s voice bleeds through, gleeful. “We swapped your skin.”
She tries to parse that in a way that isn’t deeply alarming and comes up short. “All right?”
She’s delighted to discover that Lucanis can blush a little, a faint redness that creeps from the tips of his ears along the bridge of his nose. “I changed your clothing, after,” he says. “Cleaned up what was left of the wound. Not, ah... I left the smallclothes. I hope that’s all right.”
She realizes, belatedly, that she’s only wearing a sleep shirt beneath the blanket, and wonders how high Bel’s eyebrows had gone when Lucanis had offered to do that. “Completely fine,” she says quickly, to put them both out of the misery of his uncomfortable expression, and wonders if they’re going to do every single part of this thing backwards. Oh, they’d certainly kissed several times, warm and lingering or quick and desperate, but beyond that they’d been approximately as amorous as a couple of passing acquaintances. Well. There had been the one memorable occasion when he’d pressed her into the wall of the dining room and their hands had wandered more deliberately, but even that had ended with the rest of the team walking in and the two of them springing apart, tragically still fully clothed. She’d certainly been hoping for more from that evening than settling awkwardly into what had proven to be a dinner of deep physical discomfort and a sheepish dispersal to their respective quarters.
Now she chuckles at his questioning look. “Sorry. Just thinking that stripping off my clothes and putting me to bed feels like a new step in all this.”
She expects him to deflect, to back away yet again, but he only presses his lips to hers and says, “If the thought appeals, I think I would quite like to add it to my evening routine. Although perhaps without the blood.”
She sighs against him, sinking into the kiss, then jumps when his hand slips beneath her blanket, his fingers spreading against her belly. He pauses at her reaction, but she only laughs. “Your hand is cold.”
“Then,” he says, and his fingers slip beneath the waist of her smallclothes, “I suppose I had better warm it up.”
For all his confident words, there’s a little quaver to his voice, and when he brings her to the brink, it’s with a studied, almost solemn concentration. But at the last moment he kisses her, all passion, and she feels him shivering as she digs fingers into his hair, as she moans into his mouth.
After, he sinks back to rest his chin on his arm, staring at her from the floor while he traces fingers against her thigh, and she thinks, a little dazed, that she should probably look into getting them a bigger bed. “Good?” he asks.
“Desperately.” She reaches to comb a hand back through his hair. “I’m sorry it took me so long to believe you,” she says.
He smiles crookedly. “The qamek was affecting your mind, Rook. Apart from some mild dizzy spells that may linger for a few more days, Emmrich and Bellara are convinced you will make a full recovery.”
“Good to know I don’t need to scramble around the Lighthouse fighting the whole team.” Although, she thinks ruefully, the whole lot of them together would likely take her down before she managed the first step outside her room. “And anyway, that’s not what I mean. I... I mean that I’m sorry it took me so long to believe you when you said you wanted... I mean, when we...” She laughs, a little higher-pitched than she’d like, and presses the heel of her hand to her forehead. “Well, there’s one of those dizzy spells they mentioned.”
Lucanis’s expression fades into something a little more inward, a little more distant. “Rook,” he says. “I am serious about this. About us.” His lips quirk up again into that lopsided smile. “Spite insists that I am too serious about most things. But I am sorry if I made you believe I wasn’t. I wanted to give you time and space to consider. To be sure. When you hadn’t told the team, I didn’t know if...”
On a whim, she tightens her grip on his hair, just for a moment, and he lets out his breath in a slow sigh, his eyes never leaving hers. Another kind of freefall, she thinks, vertiginous even without the blood loss. “Believe me, I’m sure,” she says. “And you’re right. We should tell the team, so it doesn’t feel so much like... like sneaking around.”
“Maybe it can feel a little like sneaking around,” Lucanis says, eyes flashing amusement. “In any case, Harding figured it out from day one, so I’m sure the others know. But it would be nice to say it more officially”
“This is new for me,” she says, and feels a little flare of annoyance at her need to explain, to over-explain. To make excuses. But he’s just watching her, and something in those eyes makes her want to tell him every thought that comes into her head. “All of this. Last time I wanted to be serious about a relationship, I was seventeen and trying to convince myself I was going to marry the stablehand I’d been dating since I was fifteen. That was half a lifetime ago.”
Lucanis raises an eyebrow and lowers his voice to an appropriately dramatic tone, the ass. “Sounds serious. Is this stablehand the jealous type? Do I need to fear assassins in the night?”
Rook pats his cheek with an open hand; he captures it to kiss the palm. “We were kids, and he turned out to be a lout. Besides, I’m coming to realize assassins in the night have many charms to recommend them.” That makes him light up, a smug little expression that drags a smile to her own lips, unbidden. The dizziness is fading, but in its wake her limbs are heavy and her eyelids are drooping. She can hear her own voice thickening, slurring with exhaustion. “Just... just please promise you’ll talk to me, Lucanis. You’ll tell me if something’s wrong. You’ll be there when I wake up.”
“I will be here as long as you need,” he says with a mild matter-of-factness that feels more binding, somehow, than an intense declaration.
She lets her eyes drift shut to the sound of his soft, even breathing, and trusts him to watch her back until morning.
Had a vague concept for a fic at 8AM, sat down to start noodling around with it at 4PM, startled/delighted myself when it veered sharply in a new direction, took a shower to regroup, sat down to quickly plan the whole thing out, then wrote and completed it. Just over 8,000 words, 3 chapters, done by 10PM. Took a break, then edited midnight to 2AM. Off to the beta reader.
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Fic: The Thunder Breaks [4,100 words | Rated M | Rook/Lucanis, Harding, Spite]
Many, many thanks to @loquaciousquark for the beta read on this! (And of course to her, @silksieve, and @fistfulofgammarays, who all put up with me flailing about writing while we were on vacation together!)
Title: The Thunder Breaks
Fandom: Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Characters/Pairings: Rook/Lucanis, Harding, Spite
Rating: M
Summary:
Injured in the battle with Ivenci after a fight riddled with clouds of qamek and phantom enemies, Rook notices both Harding and Lucanis acting strangely.
Read on AO3
---
She wakes tasting bitterness on her tongue.
Long training keeps her lying still, keeps her breathing slow until she can work out where she is and what’s happened. But there’s a catch in that breathing, a little blossoming of pain in her ribs, and she remembers Ivenci, too fast and too silent in the clouds of green. Remembers a little knife in their sleeve. Then, more confused, she remembers Harding drawing on her, eyes wide and pupils blown, and Lucanis muttering to Spite, swinging at shadows, at nightmares.
But she’d come back at Ivenci, hit them hard. The give of their solid flesh under heavy cloth had been undeniably real as they’d fallen to her blades.
So she opens her eyes, pushes shakily to her feet. Knife’s been yanked out of her side, blood’s tacky against her armor, but there’s none of the vertiginous free-fall of dangerous blood loss, so she’s got some time yet. Ivenci’s on the ground a small distance away, crouched with hands above their head in long-overdue surrender. Green clouds have dissipated, although both Harding and Lucanis look a little dazed, standing in the courtyard with weapons drawn. No more flailing around at ghosts, though.
“We all right?” Rook calls, and both of them jump at her voice; Harding’s drawn arrow wobbles and weaves in Rook’s general direction before she takes a visible breath and lowers it. Lucanis looks distant, disturbed; she hadn’t wanted mages in this fight with the risk of qamek making an appearance, but he’d been insistent that Spite would likely be unaffected. Foolish chance to take, but she hadn’t felt like she could say no, which was also foolish for a host of different reasons she was still coming to terms with.
No verbal confirmation from the others, so she says with a little more volume, “We all right?”
“Yes,” Harding says, sharp. She shakes her head, blinking rapidly. “Yes, Rook. Sorry.”
“We’re fine,” Lucanis says. He’s being sardonic, she decides, and most of that edge is the aftermath of fear rather than pain or immediate distress. He murmurs something under his breath, though, and what does she know, really?
“Good,” she says, and then Jacobus is racing in and everything starts moving again, but she can’t shake a premonition of an arrow between her shoulders, a blade through her spine.
---
They talk to Jacobus, and then they talk to Teia and Viago, and then they step back through the eluvian, just the three of them at last.
“What was that?” Harding asks once they’re safely through to the Crossroads. Rook dawdles, wanting them both ahead of her where she can keep an eye on them, but Harding’s the consummate scout and keeps doubling back to watch their flanks. “I mean, I know it was qamek of some sort, but that was… scrambling. I feel like there weren’t nearly enough bodies in that courtyard?”
“Lots of those Antaam weren’t real, I think,” Rook says.
“Real enough to fool Spite,” Lucanis says darkly. Probably pondering some Crow code about killing something that isn’t actually corporeal. She hangs back again to watch him, but he only falls into step beside her, and then she has to swallow the urge to grab him by the hand. They’re… trying this, certainly. But it’s also been new for both of them in so many different ways, and outside a handful of very pleasant actions taken in the heat of various moments it’s been irritatingly difficult to initiate anything. And she absolutely has to be the one to initiate: if she left it all to him, she has a sinking feeling he’d never touch her again out of sheer noble-minded self-deprivation. The man is determined to die of thirst while staring at a freshly brewed pot of Andoral’s Breath.
She settles for bumping his shoulder with hers. He glances over, a question in his eyes, and she deflates with a little shrug. She’d been good at flirting once, surely. “Is Spite all right?” she asks, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.
“Fine,” he says, but again he follows it up with something she can’t quite hear, something inward-directed and waspish.
“Stay sharp,” Harding says, her voice edged, but when Rook glances back she’s only walking a few paces behind, rolling out her shoulders, entirely at ease.
“You’re hurt,” Lucanis says, drawing her attention back. “Spite can smell the blood.”
“In a friendly way or in a distressingly peckish way?”
“Rook,” Lucanis says. They’re all tired and out of sorts, but she’s been reliably able to trade weak quips for weaker smiles since she’s known him. Now he only stares at her, hard and unamused.
“I’m all right,” she says. She’d forgotten about the knife wound, but now that he’s mentioned it she can’t help noticing the dried-blood tackiness of her under-armor padding pulling against her skin with each step. And she’s annoyed, really, that he’s taking this tone with her at all. “I know what I’m doing, Lucanis. I’m not about to keel over, or I’d have taken a potion.”
“I know that,” he says, and the faintly wounded confusion on his face is even more irritating, so she gives up on trying to watch the others from behind and storms a few paces ahead. At least when they’d first explored the Crossroads, she could rely on some of the gods’ cronies showing up for a quick fight to clear her head. Now it’s just a quiet slog the rest of the way home.
Lucanis says something to Harding behind her as they board the Caretaker’s boat. Maybe that’s just as well. Complaining about the leader is a time-honored tradition, good for bonding. If it’s this new dynamic that’s upsetting them both, a little bit of grumbling might be just what’s needed. She’d dealt with that as she’d slowly become more senior among the Veil Jumpers—admittedly more because of their exceptionally high attrition rate than for reasons of merit. She knows full well that her habit of tumbling into the occasional physical entanglement gets awkward when it comes time to give orders.
This is a transition period, she thinks as she glances over her shoulder to see Lucanis and Harding both watching her intently from behind. But a transition into what?
---
She begs off to her quarters to rest after a quick debrief with the team about the situation in Treviso, and closing the door on the Library behind her feels like shutting out the rest of the world. Then she sinks onto the chaise lounge and presses her face in her hands, rubbing at her aching temples. Her head hurts. Her side hurts where fucking Ivenci got their knife in, and she probably needs to deal with that. Feels like it’s still bleeding, anyway, which probably means an embrium potion and a long nap at best and a sheepish visit to Emmrich or Bellara at worst.
Stripping off her armor is a long process even under ideal circumstances, and some of those phantom Antaam weapons had been real enough to ding and dent her armor in just such a way as to make some of the buckles difficult to unclasp. She’ll have to take a stab at reshaping parts of the breastplate, she thinks with distaste, but she’s been Varric’s protégée for too long not to know the utter necessity of keeping her kit in good order.
Drawing off the breastplate also means confronting the sheer quantity of blood stuck to her side, which is far from encouraging. Shrugging out of the top of her leather under-armor frankly stings, and she feels a fresh well of warmth down her side as the little wound oozes out more blood.
There’s a knock at her door. Too loud for a knock, really. A pounding. “Rook!” Harding yells, and there’s a strange, high note of rage in her voice that sends cold fear down Rook’s spine. “You need to get out here!”
“Harding?” Rook moves to the door, but dread is crawling in her skull, dread is opening fingers to encircle her, surround her, and her heart is certainly slamming like something against the bars of a cage. She pauses just short of opening it, shivering, and calls through the door, “What’s going on out there?”
Silence. She’s gathering the nerve to push the door open when another knock slams against it, too-loud, and she jolts back a step, belatedly scrabbling for one of the knives at her belt. “Harding?”
Lucanis’s voice, a little uncertain. “Rook? Are you all right?”
She swings the door open, fist clenched on the hilt of her blade, to see Lucanis standing alone in the doorway, a small plate of meats and cheeses in hand. He takes in her state of half-dress quickly, his eyes lingering with aggravatingly honorable brevity on her breastband before darting to the blood at her side. “Haciedor, Rook, you need to let someone take a look at that. Are you still bleeding?”
She’s breathing fast, trying to get her fingers to relax on her weapon, keeping it out of sight half-behind her back. “Is Harding out there?”
Lucanis reaches a hand toward her, then seems to think better of it and grasps the doorframe instead. “Here? No. I think she’s gone back to her room.”
Which doesn’t make sense; she knows what she heard. But he’d also been in the qamek smoke, the stuff that created illusions and built a whole Antaam army in their heads. She thinks she sees a little twitch at the corner of his eye that wasn’t there before. And he’s muttering to Spite again, which isn’t normal. Not like this. Not in front of her, like she’s a stranger. “Are you all right, Lucanis?”
He stares at her. “I’m not the one leaving blood all over the floor.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I was about to take a potion and get some rest when you interrupted.”
“Oh,” he says. “I thought—well, never mind what I thought.” He straightens, brandishing the plate of meats and cheeses like it’s a talisman. “Something to eat?”
If he is still compromised by the qamek, Rook thinks, there could be anything in that food. “I’ll come by later,” she says. “Go get some rest.”
She expects him to make a wry comment about practicing what she preaches, or maybe even something a little suggestive about the kinds of commands she could be giving him, but he only looks at her for a moment, then turns and stalks off. And she sees, before he turns, a flare of violet light in his eyes.
---
In the end, she decides to go to Emmrich’s room for a more powerful dose of healing magic, only to find it empty when she knocks. She wants to ask him what he knows about qamek, or saar-qamek, or whatever variety of qamek it was that Ivenci had at their disposal. She wants someone else to know what’s going on, to be able to watch Harding and Lucanis. Maybe he’s visiting Bellara; the two of them have been thick as thieves lately, putting together some sort of scientific journal article about resonant systems.
She turns from the silent door just in time for an arrow to miss her face by inches, thudding into the wood behind her.
She gasps, drawing back, and feels something tear in her side with the sudden twist and turn. Another arrow skips across the stone of the wall next to her, and there’s a little flicker of red hair over on the far side of the Library, and then Harding is gone and Rook is pelting after her, sprinting out into the open courtyard.
The bright light outside is disorienting, and she stumbles for a moment, clutching at her side and gasping for breath. She’d pulled her underarmor back up before leaving her room, but without a breastplate she feels downright naked, exposed. Her fingers come away from her side wet with red, and she knows the yawning chasm of blood loss for what it is when she turns her head and the world keeps turning a moment too long. She staggers against the wall of the Lighthouse, but she can’t see Harding. She can’t—
“Rook?”
Lucanis is calling from the far side of the courtyard, and she can see the moment he curses and starts to run. Is there a blade in his hand? His eyes are glowing, glowing, and there’s something so horribly wrong with all of this.
She turns and sprints up the stairs along the side of the Lighthouse, feeling her heartbeat in her side, in her ears, and clambers up the last few practically on all fours in her haste. She hears voices, up at the top. Bellara, Emmrich.
Behind her, Lucanis is shouting her name again. Her shoulderblades itch in anticipation of that first blade.
Emmrich turns when she stumbles up, Bel reaches out a hand to catch her, but their faces are wrong, their expressions are furious, frightening, and something sparks to life around them, some wrong magic, some horrific power she doesn’t understand. She shoves back, gasping, and draws her rapier, and then Bel’s saying something terrible, some sort of threat, and Emmrich is chanting something, and how in the Maker’s name has the qamek made it here, made it to them?
“Rook,” says Lucanis from the top of the stairs, and he’s advancing on her slowly with a knife in his hand and wings crackling at his back, but one hand is out, reaching, and his voice is gentle despite the rage in his eyes. “Rook, can you hear me? What are you seeing?”
She lunges at him, swinging wildly to keep him at bay, and nearly overbalances herself right off the edge of the balcony when the world tilts and swings. He curses, stepping with effortless grace inside her guard and pushing the rapier aside, so she swipes with her main-gauche dagger, a wild jab that nearly catches him in the gut. But he grabs her wrist and twists, not painfully, and the knife drops from suddenly nerveless fingers.
She sways, and he catches her when her knees buckle, lowering her to the ground with surprising gentleness. “Rook, look at me. You’re safe. Nobody here is trying to hurt you. I think you are still feeling the qamek—you got a stronger dose than the rest of us. Whatever you’re seeing, please just listen to what I’m saying.”
His voice is a soothing litany, but his eyes are terrifying, and there’s a knife in his hand coming for her throat, so she jerks her fist up and manages, quite to her surprise, to connect firmly with his nose. He releases her with a gasp, and she rolls onto her stomach, trying to scramble away from him, but her legs aren’t working right, and her head slams down to the ground, and the world is spinning so fast she can only dig her fingers into the stone below her and hang on.
“Rook,” says Lucanis, his voice a little muffled by a bloodied nose. He’s looking beyond her, signalling something to Bel and Emmrich, and then he’s huddled over her, one hand grasping for a hold between her shoulders, the other shifting down to her side. A moment later, he’s applying pressure directly to the wound and she’s fighting him again, gasping, clawing, but trying to connect with him is like swimming through molasses, and she’s shaking so badly. “Just hold on,” he says. He sounds scared, she thinks with a sort of detached confusion. “Breathe, Rook.” And he’s grabbed her by the shoulders, but he’s just holding her in place, and surely he could have killed her a dozen times over by now.
She turns to meet his eyes, sees them wide and worried beyond the smear of blood under his nose. Hears the catch in his breath, feels the heat of his hand fumbling to press something into the wound again. “Trust me,” he says. “Rook, please trust me. You’re safe.”
It’s a physical effort to relax her tensed muscles, all at once, and when she does there’s a roaring in her ears and a slow tunneling of her vision. Lucanis’s voice, sharp. “I don’t think she’s breathing.” A soft touch at her cheek, the herbal green warmth of healing magic coursing through her veins, and his eyes follow her into the dark, at turns gentle and malevolent, but always watching. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She sinks.
---
She wakes on the chaise lounge with a blanket pulled up to her chin and a head that feels like a sack full of stones. But there’s a hand in hers, and so she takes a moment to inspect it, turning it over to trace the fine lines of scars, the length of the thick, square fingers, the fine dusting of dark hair across the back.
“Hello,” says Lucanis, who as it happens is sitting on the floor beside her chaise, and in his voice is relief and more than a little amusement as she continues her examination.
“You have very nice hands,” she says, then exhales slowly. “Maker’s breath. That was… unpleasant.”
“You lost a lot of blood,” he says. “The qamek was making you see things—I lost track of you in the fight, but when Ivenci hurt you, they must have managed to dose you again. I should have noticed sooner that you weren’t yourself, Rook. I’m sorry.”
“I think I might have more to apologize for, actually.” She draws her hand away from his to cup the side of his face. “How’s your nose?”
He hums amusement; there’s no sign of a bruise, so he must have opted for some of the magical healing on offer. “Perfectly fine, apart from my embarrassment at failing to dodge a cheap shot I should have seen coming. I’d forgotten how quick you are.”
She can’t resist, brushes her fingers against his lips just to watch the way his focus shifts, his eyes suddenly sharp and intent on hers. “And I take it Harding hasn’t actually been firing arrows at me and sprinting across the courtyard in villainous fashion?”
“Harding had a headache and went straight to bed after we got back. Slept it off and missed all the excitement.” Then Spite’s voice bleeds through, gleeful. “We swapped your skin.”
She tries to parse that in a way that isn’t deeply alarming and comes up short. “All right?”
She’s delighted to discover that Lucanis can blush a little, a faint redness that creeps from the tips of his ears along the bridge of his nose. “I changed your clothing, after,” he says. “Cleaned up what was left of the wound. Not, ah... I left the smallclothes. I hope that’s all right.”
She realizes, belatedly, that she’s only wearing a sleep shirt beneath the blanket, and wonders how high Bel’s eyebrows had gone when Lucanis had offered to do that. “Completely fine,” she says quickly, to put them both out of the misery of his uncomfortable expression, and wonders if they’re going to do every single part of this thing backwards. Oh, they’d certainly kissed several times, warm and lingering or quick and desperate, but beyond that they’d been approximately as amorous as a couple of passing acquaintances. Well. There had been the one memorable occasion when he’d pressed her into the wall of the dining room and their hands had wandered more deliberately, but even that had ended with the rest of the team walking in and the two of them springing apart, tragically still fully clothed. She’d certainly been hoping for more from that evening than settling awkwardly into what had proven to be a dinner of deep physical discomfort and a sheepish dispersal to their respective quarters.
Now she chuckles at his questioning look. “Sorry. Just thinking that stripping off my clothes and putting me to bed feels like a new step in all this.”
She expects him to deflect, to back away yet again, but he only presses his lips to hers and says, “If the thought appeals, I think I would quite like to add it to my evening routine. Although perhaps without the blood.”
She sighs against him, sinking into the kiss, then jumps when his hand slips beneath her blanket, his fingers spreading against her belly. He pauses at her reaction, but she only laughs. “Your hand is cold.”
“Then,” he says, and his fingers slip beneath the waist of her smallclothes, “I suppose I had better warm it up.”
For all his confident words, there’s a little quaver to his voice, and when he brings her to the brink, it’s with a studied, almost solemn concentration. But at the last moment he kisses her, all passion, and she feels him shivering as she digs fingers into his hair, as she moans into his mouth.
After, he sinks back to rest his chin on his arm, staring at her from the floor while he traces fingers against her thigh, and she thinks, a little dazed, that she should probably look into getting them a bigger bed. “Good?” he asks.
“Desperately.” She reaches to comb a hand back through his hair. “I’m sorry it took me so long to believe you,” she says.
He smiles crookedly. “The qamek was affecting your mind, Rook. Apart from some mild dizzy spells that may linger for a few more days, Emmrich and Bellara are convinced you will make a full recovery.”
“Good to know I don’t need to scramble around the Lighthouse fighting the whole team.” Although, she thinks ruefully, the whole lot of them together would likely take her down before she managed the first step outside her room. “And anyway, that’s not what I mean. I... I mean that I’m sorry it took me so long to believe you when you said you wanted... I mean, when we...” She laughs, a little higher-pitched than she’d like, and presses the heel of her hand to her forehead. “Well, there’s one of those dizzy spells they mentioned.”
Lucanis’s expression fades into something a little more inward, a little more distant. “Rook,” he says. “I am serious about this. About us.” His lips quirk up again into that lopsided smile. “Spite insists that I am too serious about most things. But I am sorry if I made you believe I wasn’t. I wanted to give you time and space to consider. To be sure. When you hadn’t told the team, I didn’t know if...”
On a whim, she tightens her grip on his hair, just for a moment, and he lets out his breath in a slow sigh, his eyes never leaving hers. Another kind of freefall, she thinks, vertiginous even without the blood loss. “Believe me, I’m sure,” she says. “And you’re right. We should tell the team, so it doesn’t feel so much like... like sneaking around.”
“Maybe it can feel a little like sneaking around,” Lucanis says, eyes flashing amusement. “In any case, Harding figured it out from day one, so I’m sure the others know. But it would be nice to say it more officially”
“This is new for me,” she says, and feels a little flare of annoyance at her need to explain, to over-explain. To make excuses. But he’s just watching her, and something in those eyes makes her want to tell him every thought that comes into her head. “All of this. Last time I wanted to be serious about a relationship, I was seventeen and trying to convince myself I was going to marry the stablehand I’d been dating since I was fifteen. That was half a lifetime ago.”
Lucanis raises an eyebrow and lowers his voice to an appropriately dramatic tone, the ass. “Sounds serious. Is this stablehand the jealous type? Do I need to fear assassins in the night?”
Rook pats his cheek with an open hand; he captures it to kiss the palm. “We were kids, and he turned out to be a lout. Besides, I’m coming to realize assassins in the night have many charms to recommend them.” That makes him light up, a smug little expression that drags a smile to her own lips, unbidden. The dizziness is fading, but in its wake her limbs are heavy and her eyelids are drooping. She can hear her own voice thickening, slurring with exhaustion. “Just... just please promise you’ll talk to me, Lucanis. You’ll tell me if something’s wrong. You’ll be there when I wake up.”
“I will be here as long as you need,” he says with a mild matter-of-factness that feels more binding, somehow, than an intense declaration.
She lets her eyes drift shut to the sound of his soft, even breathing, and trusts him to watch her back until morning.
Fic: The Thunder Breaks [4,100 words | Rated M | Rook/Lucanis, Harding, Spite]
Many, many thanks to @loquaciousquark for the beta read on this! (And of course to her, @silksieve, and @fistfulofgammarays, who all put up with me flailing about writing while we were on vacation together!)
Title: The Thunder Breaks
Fandom: Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Characters/Pairings: Rook/Lucanis, Harding, Spite
Rating: M
Summary:
Injured in the battle with Ivenci after a fight riddled with clouds of qamek and phantom enemies, Rook notices both Harding and Lucanis acting strangely.
Read on AO3
---
She wakes tasting bitterness on her tongue.
Long training keeps her lying still, keeps her breathing slow until she can work out where she is and what’s happened. But there’s a catch in that breathing, a little blossoming of pain in her ribs, and she remembers Ivenci, too fast and too silent in the clouds of green. Remembers a little knife in their sleeve. Then, more confused, she remembers Harding drawing on her, eyes wide and pupils blown, and Lucanis muttering to Spite, swinging at shadows, at nightmares.
But she’d come back at Ivenci, hit them hard. The give of their solid flesh under heavy cloth had been undeniably real as they’d fallen to her blades.
So she opens her eyes, pushes shakily to her feet. Knife’s been yanked out of her side, blood’s tacky against her armor, but there’s none of the vertiginous free-fall of dangerous blood loss, so she’s got some time yet. Ivenci’s on the ground a small distance away, crouched with hands above their head in long-overdue surrender. Green clouds have dissipated, although both Harding and Lucanis look a little dazed, standing in the courtyard with weapons drawn. No more flailing around at ghosts, though.
“We all right?” Rook calls, and both of them jump at her voice; Harding’s drawn arrow wobbles and weaves in Rook’s general direction before she takes a visible breath and lowers it. Lucanis looks distant, disturbed; she hadn’t wanted mages in this fight with the risk of qamek making an appearance, but he’d been insistent that Spite would likely be unaffected. Foolish chance to take, but she hadn’t felt like she could say no, which was also foolish for a host of different reasons she was still coming to terms with.
No verbal confirmation from the others, so she says with a little more volume, “We all right?”
“Yes,” Harding says, sharp. She shakes her head, blinking rapidly. “Yes, Rook. Sorry.”
“We’re fine,” Lucanis says. He’s being sardonic, she decides, and most of that edge is the aftermath of fear rather than pain or immediate distress. He murmurs something under his breath, though, and what does she know, really?
“Good,” she says, and then Jacobus is racing in and everything starts moving again, but she can’t shake a premonition of an arrow between her shoulders, a blade through her spine.
---
They talk to Jacobus, and then they talk to Teia and Viago, and then they step back through the eluvian, just the three of them at last.
“What was that?” Harding asks once they’re safely through to the Crossroads. Rook dawdles, wanting them both ahead of her where she can keep an eye on them, but Harding’s the consummate scout and keeps doubling back to watch their flanks. “I mean, I know it was qamek of some sort, but that was… scrambling. I feel like there weren’t nearly enough bodies in that courtyard?”
“Lots of those Antaam weren’t real, I think,” Rook says.
“Real enough to fool Spite,” Lucanis says darkly. Probably pondering some Crow code about killing something that isn’t actually corporeal. She hangs back again to watch him, but he only falls into step beside her, and then she has to swallow the urge to grab him by the hand. They’re… trying this, certainly. But it’s also been new for both of them in so many different ways, and outside a handful of very pleasant actions taken in the heat of various moments it’s been irritatingly difficult to initiate anything. And she absolutely has to be the one to initiate: if she left it all to him, she has a sinking feeling he’d never touch her again out of sheer noble-minded self-deprivation. The man is determined to die of thirst while staring at a freshly brewed pot of Andoral’s Breath.
She settles for bumping his shoulder with hers. He glances over, a question in his eyes, and she deflates with a little shrug. She’d been good at flirting once, surely. “Is Spite all right?” she asks, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.
“Fine,” he says, but again he follows it up with something she can’t quite hear, something inward-directed and waspish.
“Stay sharp,” Harding says, her voice edged, but when Rook glances back she’s only walking a few paces behind, rolling out her shoulders, entirely at ease.
“You’re hurt,” Lucanis says, drawing her attention back. “Spite can smell the blood.”
“In a friendly way or in a distressingly peckish way?”
“Rook,” Lucanis says. They’re all tired and out of sorts, but she’s been reliably able to trade weak quips for weaker smiles since she’s known him. Now he only stares at her, hard and unamused.
“I’m all right,” she says. She’d forgotten about the knife wound, but now that he’s mentioned it she can’t help noticing the dried-blood tackiness of her under-armor padding pulling against her skin with each step. And she’s annoyed, really, that he’s taking this tone with her at all. “I know what I’m doing, Lucanis. I’m not about to keel over, or I’d have taken a potion.”
“I know that,” he says, and the faintly wounded confusion on his face is even more irritating, so she gives up on trying to watch the others from behind and storms a few paces ahead. At least when they’d first explored the Crossroads, she could rely on some of the gods’ cronies showing up for a quick fight to clear her head. Now it’s just a quiet slog the rest of the way home.
Lucanis says something to Harding behind her as they board the Caretaker’s boat. Maybe that’s just as well. Complaining about the leader is a time-honored tradition, good for bonding. If it’s this new dynamic that’s upsetting them both, a little bit of grumbling might be just what’s needed. She’d dealt with that as she’d slowly become more senior among the Veil Jumpers—admittedly more because of their exceptionally high attrition rate than for reasons of merit. She knows full well that her habit of tumbling into the occasional physical entanglement gets awkward when it comes time to give orders.
This is a transition period, she thinks as she glances over her shoulder to see Lucanis and Harding both watching her intently from behind. But a transition into what?
---
She begs off to her quarters to rest after a quick debrief with the team about the situation in Treviso, and closing the door on the Library behind her feels like shutting out the rest of the world. Then she sinks onto the chaise lounge and presses her face in her hands, rubbing at her aching temples. Her head hurts. Her side hurts where fucking Ivenci got their knife in, and she probably needs to deal with that. Feels like it’s still bleeding, anyway, which probably means an embrium potion and a long nap at best and a sheepish visit to Emmrich or Bellara at worst.
Stripping off her armor is a long process even under ideal circumstances, and some of those phantom Antaam weapons had been real enough to ding and dent her armor in just such a way as to make some of the buckles difficult to unclasp. She’ll have to take a stab at reshaping parts of the breastplate, she thinks with distaste, but she’s been Varric’s protégée for too long not to know the utter necessity of keeping her kit in good order.
Drawing off the breastplate also means confronting the sheer quantity of blood stuck to her side, which is far from encouraging. Shrugging out of the top of her leather under-armor frankly stings, and she feels a fresh well of warmth down her side as the little wound oozes out more blood.
There’s a knock at her door. Too loud for a knock, really. A pounding. “Rook!” Harding yells, and there’s a strange, high note of rage in her voice that sends cold fear down Rook’s spine. “You need to get out here!”
“Harding?” Rook moves to the door, but dread is crawling in her skull, dread is opening fingers to encircle her, surround her, and her heart is certainly slamming like something against the bars of a cage. She pauses just short of opening it, shivering, and calls through the door, “What’s going on out there?”
Silence. She’s gathering the nerve to push the door open when another knock slams against it, too-loud, and she jolts back a step, belatedly scrabbling for one of the knives at her belt. “Harding?”
Lucanis’s voice, a little uncertain. “Rook? Are you all right?”
She swings the door open, fist clenched on the hilt of her blade, to see Lucanis standing alone in the doorway, a small plate of meats and cheeses in hand. He takes in her state of half-dress quickly, his eyes lingering with aggravatingly honorable brevity on her breastband before darting to the blood at her side. “Haciedor, Rook, you need to let someone take a look at that. Are you still bleeding?”
She’s breathing fast, trying to get her fingers to relax on her weapon, keeping it out of sight half-behind her back. “Is Harding out there?”
Lucanis reaches a hand toward her, then seems to think better of it and grasps the doorframe instead. “Here? No. I think she’s gone back to her room.”
Which doesn’t make sense; she knows what she heard. But he’d also been in the qamek smoke, the stuff that created illusions and built a whole Antaam army in their heads. She thinks she sees a little twitch at the corner of his eye that wasn’t there before. And he’s muttering to Spite again, which isn’t normal. Not like this. Not in front of her, like she’s a stranger. “Are you all right, Lucanis?”
He stares at her. “I’m not the one leaving blood all over the floor.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I was about to take a potion and get some rest when you interrupted.”
“Oh,” he says. “I thought—well, never mind what I thought.” He straightens, brandishing the plate of meats and cheeses like it’s a talisman. “Something to eat?”
If he is still compromised by the qamek, Rook thinks, there could be anything in that food. “I’ll come by later,” she says. “Go get some rest.”
She expects him to make a wry comment about practicing what she preaches, or maybe even something a little suggestive about the kinds of commands she could be giving him, but he only looks at her for a moment, then turns and stalks off. And she sees, before he turns, a flare of violet light in his eyes.
---
In the end, she decides to go to Emmrich’s room for a more powerful dose of healing magic, only to find it empty when she knocks. She wants to ask him what he knows about qamek, or saar-qamek, or whatever variety of qamek it was that Ivenci had at their disposal. She wants someone else to know what’s going on, to be able to watch Harding and Lucanis. Maybe he’s visiting Bellara; the two of them have been thick as thieves lately, putting together some sort of scientific journal article about resonant systems.
She turns from the silent door just in time for an arrow to miss her face by inches, thudding into the wood behind her.
She gasps, drawing back, and feels something tear in her side with the sudden twist and turn. Another arrow skips across the stone of the wall next to her, and there’s a little flicker of red hair over on the far side of the Library, and then Harding is gone and Rook is pelting after her, sprinting out into the open courtyard.
The bright light outside is disorienting, and she stumbles for a moment, clutching at her side and gasping for breath. She’d pulled her underarmor back up before leaving her room, but without a breastplate she feels downright naked, exposed. Her fingers come away from her side wet with red, and she knows the yawning chasm of blood loss for what it is when she turns her head and the world keeps turning a moment too long. She staggers against the wall of the Lighthouse, but she can’t see Harding. She can’t—
“Rook?”
Lucanis is calling from the far side of the courtyard, and she can see the moment he curses and starts to run. Is there a blade in his hand? His eyes are glowing, glowing, and there’s something so horribly wrong with all of this.
She turns and sprints up the stairs along the side of the Lighthouse, feeling her heartbeat in her side, in her ears, and clambers up the last few practically on all fours in her haste. She hears voices, up at the top. Bellara, Emmrich.
Behind her, Lucanis is shouting her name again. Her shoulderblades itch in anticipation of that first blade.
Emmrich turns when she stumbles up, Bel reaches out a hand to catch her, but their faces are wrong, their expressions are furious, frightening, and something sparks to life around them, some wrong magic, some horrific power she doesn’t understand. She shoves back, gasping, and draws her rapier, and then Bel’s saying something terrible, some sort of threat, and Emmrich is chanting something, and how in the Maker’s name has the qamek made it here, made it to them?
“Rook,” says Lucanis from the top of the stairs, and he’s advancing on her slowly with a knife in his hand and wings crackling at his back, but one hand is out, reaching, and his voice is gentle despite the rage in his eyes. “Rook, can you hear me? What are you seeing?”
She lunges at him, swinging wildly to keep him at bay, and nearly overbalances herself right off the edge of the balcony when the world tilts and swings. He curses, stepping with effortless grace inside her guard and pushing the rapier aside, so she swipes with her main-gauche dagger, a wild jab that nearly catches him in the gut. But he grabs her wrist and twists, not painfully, and the knife drops from suddenly nerveless fingers.
She sways, and he catches her when her knees buckle, lowering her to the ground with surprising gentleness. “Rook, look at me. You’re safe. Nobody here is trying to hurt you. I think you are still feeling the qamek—you got a stronger dose than the rest of us. Whatever you’re seeing, please just listen to what I’m saying.”
His voice is a soothing litany, but his eyes are terrifying, and there’s a knife in his hand coming for her throat, so she jerks her fist up and manages, quite to her surprise, to connect firmly with his nose. He releases her with a gasp, and she rolls onto her stomach, trying to scramble away from him, but her legs aren’t working right, and her head slams down to the ground, and the world is spinning so fast she can only dig her fingers into the stone below her and hang on.
“Rook,” says Lucanis, his voice a little muffled by a bloodied nose. He’s looking beyond her, signalling something to Bel and Emmrich, and then he’s huddled over her, one hand grasping for a hold between her shoulders, the other shifting down to her side. A moment later, he’s applying pressure directly to the wound and she’s fighting him again, gasping, clawing, but trying to connect with him is like swimming through molasses, and she’s shaking so badly. “Just hold on,” he says. He sounds scared, she thinks with a sort of detached confusion. “Breathe, Rook.” And he’s grabbed her by the shoulders, but he’s just holding her in place, and surely he could have killed her a dozen times over by now.
She turns to meet his eyes, sees them wide and worried beyond the smear of blood under his nose. Hears the catch in his breath, feels the heat of his hand fumbling to press something into the wound again. “Trust me,” he says. “Rook, please trust me. You’re safe.”
It’s a physical effort to relax her tensed muscles, all at once, and when she does there’s a roaring in her ears and a slow tunneling of her vision. Lucanis’s voice, sharp. “I don’t think she’s breathing.” A soft touch at her cheek, the herbal green warmth of healing magic coursing through her veins, and his eyes follow her into the dark, at turns gentle and malevolent, but always watching. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She sinks.
---
She wakes on the chaise lounge with a blanket pulled up to her chin and a head that feels like a sack full of stones. But there’s a hand in hers, and so she takes a moment to inspect it, turning it over to trace the fine lines of scars, the length of the thick, square fingers, the fine dusting of dark hair across the back.
“Hello,” says Lucanis, who as it happens is sitting on the floor beside her chaise, and in his voice is relief and more than a little amusement as she continues her examination.
“You have very nice hands,” she says, then exhales slowly. “Maker’s breath. That was… unpleasant.”
“You lost a lot of blood,” he says. “The qamek was making you see things—I lost track of you in the fight, but when Ivenci hurt you, they must have managed to dose you again. I should have noticed sooner that you weren’t yourself, Rook. I’m sorry.”
“I think I might have more to apologize for, actually.” She draws her hand away from his to cup the side of his face. “How’s your nose?”
He hums amusement; there’s no sign of a bruise, so he must have opted for some of the magical healing on offer. “Perfectly fine, apart from my embarrassment at failing to dodge a cheap shot I should have seen coming. I’d forgotten how quick you are.”
She can’t resist, brushes her fingers against his lips just to watch the way his focus shifts, his eyes suddenly sharp and intent on hers. “And I take it Harding hasn’t actually been firing arrows at me and sprinting across the courtyard in villainous fashion?”
“Harding had a headache and went straight to bed after we got back. Slept it off and missed all the excitement.” Then Spite’s voice bleeds through, gleeful. “We swapped your skin.”
She tries to parse that in a way that isn’t deeply alarming and comes up short. “All right?”
She’s delighted to discover that Lucanis can blush a little, a faint redness that creeps from the tips of his ears along the bridge of his nose. “I changed your clothing, after,” he says. “Cleaned up what was left of the wound. Not, ah... I left the smallclothes. I hope that’s all right.”
She realizes, belatedly, that she’s only wearing a sleep shirt beneath the blanket, and wonders how high Bel’s eyebrows had gone when Lucanis had offered to do that. “Completely fine,” she says quickly, to put them both out of the misery of his uncomfortable expression, and wonders if they’re going to do every single part of this thing backwards. Oh, they’d certainly kissed several times, warm and lingering or quick and desperate, but beyond that they’d been approximately as amorous as a couple of passing acquaintances. Well. There had been the one memorable occasion when he’d pressed her into the wall of the dining room and their hands had wandered more deliberately, but even that had ended with the rest of the team walking in and the two of them springing apart, tragically still fully clothed. She’d certainly been hoping for more from that evening than settling awkwardly into what had proven to be a dinner of deep physical discomfort and a sheepish dispersal to their respective quarters.
Now she chuckles at his questioning look. “Sorry. Just thinking that stripping off my clothes and putting me to bed feels like a new step in all this.”
She expects him to deflect, to back away yet again, but he only presses his lips to hers and says, “If the thought appeals, I think I would quite like to add it to my evening routine. Although perhaps without the blood.”
She sighs against him, sinking into the kiss, then jumps when his hand slips beneath her blanket, his fingers spreading against her belly. He pauses at her reaction, but she only laughs. “Your hand is cold.”
“Then,” he says, and his fingers slip beneath the waist of her smallclothes, “I suppose I had better warm it up.”
For all his confident words, there’s a little quaver to his voice, and when he brings her to the brink, it’s with a studied, almost solemn concentration. But at the last moment he kisses her, all passion, and she feels him shivering as she digs fingers into his hair, as she moans into his mouth.
After, he sinks back to rest his chin on his arm, staring at her from the floor while he traces fingers against her thigh, and she thinks, a little dazed, that she should probably look into getting them a bigger bed. “Good?” he asks.
“Desperately.” She reaches to comb a hand back through his hair. “I’m sorry it took me so long to believe you,” she says.
He smiles crookedly. “The qamek was affecting your mind, Rook. Apart from some mild dizzy spells that may linger for a few more days, Emmrich and Bellara are convinced you will make a full recovery.”
“Good to know I don’t need to scramble around the Lighthouse fighting the whole team.” Although, she thinks ruefully, the whole lot of them together would likely take her down before she managed the first step outside her room. “And anyway, that’s not what I mean. I... I mean that I’m sorry it took me so long to believe you when you said you wanted... I mean, when we...” She laughs, a little higher-pitched than she’d like, and presses the heel of her hand to her forehead. “Well, there’s one of those dizzy spells they mentioned.”
Lucanis’s expression fades into something a little more inward, a little more distant. “Rook,” he says. “I am serious about this. About us.” His lips quirk up again into that lopsided smile. “Spite insists that I am too serious about most things. But I am sorry if I made you believe I wasn’t. I wanted to give you time and space to consider. To be sure. When you hadn’t told the team, I didn’t know if...”
On a whim, she tightens her grip on his hair, just for a moment, and he lets out his breath in a slow sigh, his eyes never leaving hers. Another kind of freefall, she thinks, vertiginous even without the blood loss. “Believe me, I’m sure,” she says. “And you’re right. We should tell the team, so it doesn’t feel so much like... like sneaking around.”
“Maybe it can feel a little like sneaking around,” Lucanis says, eyes flashing amusement. “In any case, Harding figured it out from day one, so I’m sure the others know. But it would be nice to say it more officially”
“This is new for me,” she says, and feels a little flare of annoyance at her need to explain, to over-explain. To make excuses. But he’s just watching her, and something in those eyes makes her want to tell him every thought that comes into her head. “All of this. Last time I wanted to be serious about a relationship, I was seventeen and trying to convince myself I was going to marry the stablehand I’d been dating since I was fifteen. That was half a lifetime ago.”
Lucanis raises an eyebrow and lowers his voice to an appropriately dramatic tone, the ass. “Sounds serious. Is this stablehand the jealous type? Do I need to fear assassins in the night?”
Rook pats his cheek with an open hand; he captures it to kiss the palm. “We were kids, and he turned out to be a lout. Besides, I’m coming to realize assassins in the night have many charms to recommend them.” That makes him light up, a smug little expression that drags a smile to her own lips, unbidden. The dizziness is fading, but in its wake her limbs are heavy and her eyelids are drooping. She can hear her own voice thickening, slurring with exhaustion. “Just... just please promise you’ll talk to me, Lucanis. You’ll tell me if something’s wrong. You’ll be there when I wake up.”
“I will be here as long as you need,” he says with a mild matter-of-factness that feels more binding, somehow, than an intense declaration.
She lets her eyes drift shut to the sound of his soft, even breathing, and trusts him to watch her back until morning.
Summary: Weisshaupt has fallen. In the aftermath, Rook, the team, and the surviving Wardens try to pick up the pieces. Maybe pieces of Rook's relationship with Neve can be salvaged, too.
Pairing: Rook/Neve (eventually!)
Characters: Rook, Neve Gallus, Lace Harding
Rating: G
Word Count: ~7500 in five parts
AO3 link
Weisshaupt is obviously a narrative and character turning point. However, the game only gave me tiny morsels of how a Grey Warden Rook responds to this event, so I needed to play with that a bit.
Updated with chapter 5! and complete for now, though I may revisit that in the future.
In which Neve remembers Weisshaupt, and makes an overture.
Preview:
When Neve was trying to work through a problem, usually she liked to go for a walk along the docks, preferably in the evening when the day’s work had died down. She’d watch the waves and skip stones, let the waves and the wind clear her head.
The current problems were tangling her up in knots. The gods and whatever they were planning, the Venatori and their schemes. There was Zara and those freshly harvested demons, the coup in Minrathous, the incursion into the Necropolis, the surges of blight everywhere, the whereabouts of the darkspawn who’d recently overrun Weisshaupt… she’d been racking her brain for ages, trying to tease out connections, find an avenue of approach, even a guess what the gods might do next. She’d been staring at her notes so long that she could see the scribbles and arrows when she closed her eyes.
The Fade around the Lighthouse, however, didn’t have docks, or even water. Next best was a fire.
Okay. I was on my beloved AO3 and I saw something that made me do a double take. So, now I really want to know…
What is your AO3 user ID?
I’m an OG user 5 digits or less
Six figures baby!
I’m in the millions…
Remaining time: 1 day 11 hours
I’m so curious to see how long people have been on AO3! I know some people have been on there since beta/invite only, but I would love to see what the number is on tumblr!
Kata Ingellvar and Lucanis on a date in Treviso. A gondola, lanterns and a starry night. Thank you so much @loquaciousquark for this amazing comm request! ♥
If you are interested in a commission please send me an email to [email protected]
Ahh, it's my girl! My girl and her guy, my favorite pair of dingbats!
This is a moment from the last chapter of my recent Rook-gets-possessed-by-Hezenkoss fic, Hollow Bones. I don't want to spoil too much of this absolute comedy's ending, but—and I know this is a shock, especially for my long-term readers—they both make it through and somehow still end up happy to see each other at the end of it.
@point-maitimo was a joy to work with and incredibly patient with my requests, especially regarding my gangly grasshopper of a PC and her clinging adoration for her grave gold. Thank you so much for your kindness to these two characters I adore!
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Took a blacksmithing class just for the heck of it this afternoon! Transformed half a horseshoe into a knife and all it took was about 3 hours of Big Fire, Many Sparks, and Hit With Hammer.
Tagged by @jadesabre301 for a Last Line meme! I recently hit 100k on my post-game Rook/Lucanis fic and we're actually starting to round the final bend there, so have some of that.
“What things.” Her voice was a strange monotone; her eyes were fixed on the horizon.
“I think we have an agreement,” Lucanis said carefully, “about using me to hurt yourself.”
Also not technically a Last Line, but I wrote a fun little mid-game fic on holiday last week that I quite enjoyed and am looking forward to posting!
She gasps, drawing back, and feels something tear in her side with the sudden twist and turn. Another arrow skips across the stone of the wall next to her, and there’s a little flicker of red hair over on the far side of the library, and then Harding is gone and Rook is pelting after her, sprinting out into the open courtyard.
Tagging all and sundry who have ongoing writing projects! Tag me when you post 'em!!
Been wanting to write that epic frotfest where woobie slave!Steve Rogers runs away with werewolf Loki and they ride off into the sunset? Come on in, we’d love to have you!
IIBB is a panfandom mini-bang challenge. This means that if you sign up to participate, you agree to make a complete piece of fanwork by the assignment deadline. For 2026, we will be accepting fic, art (including comics), fanmixes, podfic, and vids. Detailed guidelines are in the rules. If you would like to make fanwork in another medium, let us know and we’ll be happy to include it!
IIBB 2026 will run from July 25 - Sept 27.
Sign-ups open July 25 and close August 1.
Assignments are due Sept 27.
If you have questions or concerns, feel free to drop us an ask!
Finished Bloodborne a while ago. Still thinking about it.
It's been a long time since I did a large watercolor piece, and I tried some gouache on this. I don't know if it's entirely successful, but I learned some things.
(with the caveat that a lot of the OC names are in flux in this draft stage; this one is too close to Antoine for my taste)
She felt an odd pang of guilt; she wasn’t sure she would have recognized him on sight without his grandmother’s prompting. “Hi, Anton. Guess I’m back in town.”
[Send me an ask with a word and I’ll share a sentence (or a few) from my WiP that starts with that word!]
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