da-thedas-trashpanda - Tumblr blog

da-thedas-trashpanda · 2 months ago

Text

As Rook finished drying the last plate Lucanis had handed her, he turned to the small coffee station he'd set up and grabbed his mug. A second later, the rolled-up dish towel snapped the back of his hand. As the mug slipped from his grasp, Rook swooped over and snatched it from the air, shoving it behind her back.

"Nope," she said. "No more coffee for you."

"Rook," he insisted, "I'm fine."

"Uh-huh." She raised an unimpressed eyebrow his direction. "And does your definition of fine include nodding off in the risotto?"

"I wasn't nodding off. I was... assessing the flavor palette."

"Uh-huh," she said again. "You're going to bed."

"Rook—"

She cut him off by addressing the rest of the room. "Hey, Spite?"

Spite immediately abandoned weaving his hands through the flames of the fireplace and zipped over to stand in front of her at full attention. "Yes!"

When Rook looked at Lucanis expectantly, he sighed and indicated the space to his left with a slight nod of his head.

"Spite," Rook said, addressing the spot, "I want you to come up to my room once Lucanis is asleep, okay?"

"Yes!" Spite shouted again, and Lucanis winced. No matter how many times he explained that increasing his volume would not allow Rook to hear him, he kept trying.

"You don't trust me?" Lucanis asked.

"With my life? Completely," Rook replied. "With your own health and well-being? Absolutely not."

She stepped forward to poke one finger into his chest. "And if he's not up there within thirty minutes, I'm coming back down with one of Viago's knockout potions."

The feel of her fingertip pressing the fabric of his shirt against his skin triggered an immediate memory of the moment they had almost kissed in the pantry. A second later, Rook seemed to remember it too; after glancing down at her finger, she suddenly pulled her hand back and stepped away from him, then tried to cover the moment with a bright smile.

"Thirty minutes," she said again, and she turned on her heel and began to walk toward the door. She held up the mug, dangling from the fingers of her other hand.

"And I'm keeping this until morning."

"We have other mugs," he called after her.

"But this one is your favorite," she taunted as she pushed open the door and stepped out into the courtyard.

Lucanis shook his head, but he found himself smiling, at least until Spite imposed himself between Lucanis and his view of the door and pointed an imperious finger at the pantry. Lucanis snorted, but he followed the unspoken order, to Spite's laughing delight. He had been sleeping more since they had come to a better understanding of each other, but he still didn't sleep well and doubted he ever would. And on more than once recent occasion, he and Rook had stayed up later than they should simply sitting together and sharing their thoughts and stories and details of their lives. Those moments he did not regret in the least, no matter how tired he might be.

Once inside the pantry, he unbuttoned his vest, unclasped his collar pins, and loosened his cravat. He stripped them off piece by piece and laid them carefully over a barrel that had become an impromptu dressing table. Beneath the bed, he kept a bag of spare clothes, including a worn-soft shirt and pants that were more comfortable for sleeping. But if Spite were going to see Rook...

He tried to remember the last person who would have seen him dressed for bed. Probably Illario when they were children. The thought of Rook seeing him like that was... not bad per se—not bad at all really—but it was a soft kind of intimacy that rarely appeared in any romance book and that stretched his feelings about her into a painful kind of longing. Somehow thinking of kissing her, of touching her, felt less dangerous than thinking of climbing into a shared bed at the end of a long day. So he settled for tugging off his boots and setting them beside his pallet before lying down. Even the sight of his stocking feet felt a bit too revealing.

"Put my boots on before you go outside," he told Spite.

Spite just flapped an annoyed hand at him, preoccupied with arranging a line of a dozen potatoes into an order that Lucanis could not decipher.

"And don't pester Rook."

Spite snapped to face him with a scowl. "She. Invited me."

"I know, but just... don't overstay your welcome. Don't be a bother."

With a sneer, Spite turned back to his potatoes. Lucanis sighed and rubbed his tired eyes with one hand. Lying down made his ever-present exhaustion seem to rise like a dammed puddle in a stream. Within a few deep breaths, it overflowed the banks of his consciousness, and as he slipped under, he heard Spite muttering to himself.

"I'm not. A bother. You're. A bother."

-------

When Lucanis next blinked his eyes open, it felt like only minutes had passed, but even without any windows (not that the light in the Fade changed much anyway), he could tell he had slept for some time. His mouth was dry, and his eyes felt gummy. He rubbed at them as he sat up and then knuckled his lower back with a wince. Maybe Rook was right about him needing a thicker bedroll for his palette. He reached up to comb his fingers through his hair—

—and froze when he encountered an obstacle. Feeling with his hand, he discovered his hair had been gathered in a small bun held by a leather cord.

"Spite?"

Spite appeared with a flash and a wide grin, as if he had been awaiting his cue, and Lucanis stared when he saw that even as a vision, Spite's hair was also tied up in a bun. Lucanis had never seen any part of Spite's appearance change. He hadn't known it could.

"Spite... did you tie up our hair?"

"No!" Spite crowed. "Rook did! Said it. Looked good!"

That statement was too much for Lucanis's sleep-bleary and confused mind to fully process.

"Why?" he asked.

"Handsome," Spite replied with a smug smile.

"No. I mean, why did she put our hair up?"

Spite shrugged. "Her hair down. Ours up."

"She had her hair down?"

At Spite's nod, Lucanis tried to remember if he had ever seen Rook without her hair piled in a messy bun on top of her head. Not a single instance came to mind.

"She looked good. Too," Spite said, which did nothing to temper the twist of a sad sort of jealousy in Lucanis's chest. "Looked pretty. Felt soft."

"You touched her hair? Did she say you could?" Lucanis demanded.

Spite scoffed at him. "Asked me to. Let me. Brush it."

Lucanis swallowed as the stab of longing he'd felt the night before returned tenfold. He looked down at his hands on his knees. Turning them palms up, he rubbed his thumbs against the pads of his other fingers. The nerves of his fingertips knew the feel of Rook's hair, the weight of it, the texture, and yet he had no conscious memory to hold on to. He'd been betrayed by his closest family, and now even his own body kept secrets from him.

He and Spite both looked to the door when they heard someone enter the dining hall beyond. Spite sniffed the air and smiled.

"Jasmine and chocolate," he announced, and then he disappeared through the wall.

That meant Rook, which was surprising; he didn't know what time it was, but he didn't hear anyone else, and Rook was rarely the first one awake. Lucanis stood slowly, plagued by a strange sort of nervousness that he thought he'd put behind him, at least as far as Rook was concerned. He chided himself—it wasn't as if anything untoward had happened—and quickly exited the pantry before he could consider staying hidden.

Rook smiled when she saw him, though as her smile slowly faded, he realized he was staring at her without a word. Her dark-brown hair tumbled down in lazy waves past her shoulders, nearly to her waist. For a brief flash, his mind tried to conjure how she would look clad in nothing but her hair, but he shook the fantasy away before he could become even more addled.

"Apologies," he said. "Your hair. I've never seen it down before."

"Oh," she laughed, and she tugged at it in a self-conscious gesture. "Yeah. I actually came to offer a trade." She held out his mug and pointed at the back of her own head where his bun sat on him. "I let Spite borrow that tie, and I can't find any others in my room right now."

"Of course," he replied, and he hurried to pull the cord loose from his own hair, wincing a bit when he managed to take some strands with it. He held it out to her, and their fingers brushed as they exchanged his mug for her cord.

"Thanks," she said and gestured at her hair again. "This isn't exactly practical for fighting or... anything really. I should probably just cut it, but..."

"But?" he prompted.

They stood close enough that she had to look up the few inches' difference in their heights. From the day he'd met her, the word he had thought to describe Rook was sharp—the way her eyes scanned a room, the way her blades whipped through their enemies, the way a quip or a laugh always seemed poised to pounce from her lips.

Looking up at him now, that honed edge seemed softened somehow. Lucanis didn't know if it was her hair or the early hour or the fact that it was just the two of them (and Spite) in the room. He hoped for the last.

Rook shrugged. "I like it. The way it looks, the way it feels." She smiled again. "I'd say it's vanity, but I'm generally the only one who sees it like this, so I'm not sure that applies."

"It's beautiful," he told her.

Her eyes dropped to the floor for just a breath—another glimpse of the person she was rather than the leader everyone needed her to be—before she lifted her chin with her usual smirk.

"You looked good too. If I find any of my other ties, I'll let you have one."

"Maybe," he hedged, and she laughed.

Then she bent at the waist and let her head hang down as she expertly gathered her hair and twisted it into its normal bun. She secured it with the leather cord and then popped up straight again, hands on her hips, back to the Rook that the rest of the world knew.

"We should start breakfast," she said. "And by us, I mean you. I'm starving."

Lucanis chuckled. "You aren't going to help at all?"

"I brought back your mug. Doesn't coffee help?"

"Coffee always helps."

They fell easily into banter that only picked up as the others arrived singularly or in pairs to start the day. But as he plated the food and she grabbed the dishes to bring to the table, she offered him a fond smile that replaced the ache of longing in his chest with a tenderness that felt deep enough to sink into, one that would put the finest mattress in Thedas to shame.

308 notes · View notes