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late-to-the-fandom · 3 months ago

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So @emmg and @rooks-leather-jumpsuit I went back to my writing app and found the rest of Emmrich’s angst wank. I think I remember now realising it was 6k something words and going ‘gross, who wants to read all that’ and then somehow in oxy-logic thinking it'd be better to just send you part of it? Idk, drugs man.

I've skimmed through it and I *think* it has a coherent enough beginning/middle/end, but I'm not taking time to edit this fever-dream so no promises that it makes any real sense all the way through. But, in case anyone's really hungry for a late night junky angsty Emmrich smut rambling, here you go, I guess.

Emmrich stood stiff as his unwanted erection in the centre of his Lighthouse room. His hair, by contrast, fell uncharacteristically limp. He could feel the unstyled strands tickling the new lines across his brow he feared — in that distant, ironic way one experiences fear in the aftershocks of unthinkable calamity — would soon become permanent. His arms hung similarly at his sides, useless and impotent as the rest of him. Except, of course, the only part of himself he did not need alert and ready for action just now.

It had been three days since the fight against the gods on Tearstone island. Three days since Davrin had fallen, Bellara was captured, and Rook lost, imprisoned beyond reach in the deepest recesses of the Fade. Three days since Emmrich had slept more than a few fitful minutes, consumed more than a thoughtless gulp of tepid tea and whatever tasteless food the others prepared and Manfred thrust into his increasingly clumsy hands. Three days since the lauded scholar — whose intelligence and expertise in the Fade was the very reason Rook had recruited him in the first place — had been able to put together more than two consecutive coherant thoughts that weren’t abruptly derailed by the instrusive image of her outline suddenly vanishing from his sight, his reality, and the dry heave of his stomach that inevitably followed.

Rook — his Rook, as she’d been in his thoughts for longer than Emmrich cared to admit to anyone, including himself — was gone.

Alive? Dead? Injured? Bleeding out into the ether? Slowly slipping into madness? It was impossible for him to know; a particularly well-chosen cruelty for a man who treasured knowledge above grave gold. And the likelihood of his ever finding out what had become of the woman he’d grown to care for so deeply — to love, he made himself think the word now even if he had been too cowardly, too consumed with his own insecurities to say it to her — was too slim for his tired mind to catch upon it; hope a splinter under his skin too small to be grasped by even the most delicate of instruments, but impossible not to feel.

And he felt. Oh, he felt.

Emmrich shifted in place, adjusting the front of his trousers ostensibly to ease the strain, though he knew full well his needy, neglected cock would take even the brush of his hand through fabric as an overture. After all, it had been three days. He had not gone three days without Rook since he’d met her; nor, since the miraculous bud of their romance had blossomed, gone such an inhumane amount of time without her touch. He had always been susceptible to ritual, and so she had become. His body had learned it could rely on Rook’s as surely as did the rest of Thedas, grown accustomed to drowning each day’s tensions and stresses and the looming spectre of unknown doom in the sound and smell and sight of her.

Only Rook’s body, along with her clever mind and indomitable spirit, was lost to him, now. She could not ease this crushing pressure of panic, of regret, of growing despair, of a nerve-rattling rage he had experienced only a handful of times in his life, of the simple, primal need to have her again — to see her, to touch her, to clutch her body to his and hear her voice assuring him that she was alright, that he was alright — with her wit or words or the subtle, grounding weight of her atop him, or underneath him, or wrapped around him. She was gone.

She was gone.

The thought threatened to splinter Emmrich’s aching head and upend his empty stomach, yet refused, perversely, to reach other key parts of his anatomy.

He’d already cycled through the old standbys — breathing exercises; book after book on the deeper Fade; reams of notes begun meticulous and trailing into indecipherable scrawls; a cold bath, the unheated water raising goose pimples across his flesh but doing nothing to cool his boiling blood — all to no lasting effect. There was nothing for it. He wanted Rook. Needed her. She had caused this onset of madness and only she could drive it back. In desperation, Emmrich ran a hand through the loose hair teasing his forehead and blinked around at the haphazard stacks of books, the laden shelves, his armory of distractions, searching for something, anything, some solution, some salvation. If nothing he had gained over the last fifty-odd years could help Rook, surely, surely, he had something to subdue his other pressing problem.

His gaze fell on the crude statuette of a raven alighting on a skull: Rook’s sole contribution to the room. “I saw it, and … I don’t know. It made me think of you for some reason.” A pointless bit of frippery. A priceless treasure, because she had given it to him. And the last of Emmrich’s self-restraint collapsed. He had the strength to fight nothing, including his own base need, any longer.

He listened. The clomp of Manfred’s boots could not be heard on the landing above or in the hall without. He skirted one tower of books to lock the door, then clambered over the low ledge of another to reach the high-backed chair — Rook’s chair, the one she always took when visiting; before she had begun simply seating herself in his lap as soon as she entered — and dragged it towards the dying fire, fumbling at his trouser buttons on the way. The thought occured as he dropped into it that the upholestry might still hold her scent, but his ready erection had sprung free, a single bead of moisture leaking from the tip as it met the Fade-perfect air. To change position required more energy than he could summon now.

On the same principle, he did not bother removing his rings or bangles — let them rattle, let them chafe —nor unwind his waistcoat or make any effort to keep his shirt out of harm’s way. A disciplined voice at the back of Emmrich’s head chided him for this. He ignored it. What was one more indignity? He swiped a thumb across the dripping head of his cock, and, when that proved insufficient moisture, licked his palm unceremoniously before setting a quick, almost cruel pace. He kept his eyes shut as his hand worked. This was his body’s affair. He could not stop it, but he would not give it the satisfaction of true participation. This was something to endure, not enjoy.

Instead, Emmrich let his mind wander past the waves of dull relief, retracing the worn mental paths it had trod the last three days, searching for some unexplored avenue of thought that would lead to Rook’s salvation.

It’s what she would be doing, he knew.

Rook did not panic. Rook did not fall to pieces. Always, Rook set her own fears and doubts and needs aside and forged a path through whatever crisis occurred for others to follow. Rook, their roles reversed, would have long since rallied her devastated team and woven their individual strengths into some inexplicably effective plan that would ensure his rescue. Most likely, they would both be safely back in his bed even now. Emmrich’s imagination, like his hand, worked in delirious frenzy, envisioning his long limbs intertwined with hers, their skin stuck together with sweat as they rested in the afterglow of the sort of messy, desperate sex he, a master of his every craft, had always been ashamed to indulge in, but that Rook, for some reason, preferred to his painstakingly planned and artfully executed scenes.

Certainly, she wouldn’t be stretched out on her sofa, indulging her body while he languished alone in the Fade.

Emmrich flinched away from the thought, and the smooth rub of rings against hypersensitive flesh. It was not a unfamiliar sensation — this was far from a foreign act — but, in this moment, his cock chafed against it. It did not want his hand, with its predictable rhythm, the well-practiced twist of his wrist, all the worn trappings of efficient self-pleasure. It wanted Rook.

Sliding his legs shamelessly further apart, boots ruffling the rug, Emmrich tightened his grip and let pictures play across the back of his eyelids like a procession of noble dead: Rook’s fingers tracing her favourite path up the pulsing vein on his underside, each gentle scrape of nails followed by a lave of her tongue; the warm wet of her mouth, hollowed sporadically, only when she remembered, when she wasn’t too preoccupied with her own enjoyment of him; and the even warmer, wetter, impossibly tight confines of her cunt — Emmrich winced automatically at the word he could only think when worked up like this.

How quickly had her body become his favourite book, the thumbing through of which was a habit as essential as his exercise, comforting as his morning tea, as unthinkable to go without as his daily scrupulous shave. Without them — without her — he was less himself. Emmrich had known longer lovers, but none who had insinuated themselves so quickly, so vitally, under his skin, embedded themselves in his inner workings as though they belonged there every bit as much as his veins, his nerves, his bones…

…And whose abrupt amputation left the rest of him disabled. All of him. His cock, for all its stubborn insistence, apparently as incapable of coming to any productive conclusions as his mind.

With an impatient sound that could only charitably be categorised a growl, and which seemed more to Emmrich’s cottony ears like a strangled whimper, he twisted his neck until his nose brushed the fabric of the chair. He inhaled. Slow. Deep. If he strained his senses — and imagination — he thought he could detect a hint of the clean, slightly floral soap Rook used: the soap he’d bought her himself upon discovering her use of that awful, skin-searing lye; just one of his myriad efforts to improve her life as she had his, to make himself as essential to her as she was to him. He breathed again, nostrils quivering, battered cock twitching under a especially ruthless twist of his hand. And, whether real or an artifice of his mind, the familiar scent was visceral enough to draw tears to the corners of his eyes.

A ragged half-sob bubbled in Emmrich’s chest, and, with it, a swell of momentary pity for his body, wracked and wretched with grief. He relaxed his grip on his cock, slowed his pace by degrees, until his strokes were closer to that languorous, indulgent rhythm he always preferred in the beginning. The slow accumulation of little, precious pleasures, the savouring of each new sensation, a firm foundation of desire laid before, at last, breaking ground — this had always been Emmrich’s preference in romantic endeavours.

And Rook… the learning and ultimate loving of Rook had been the meticulous construction of a palace as grand as the Necropolis itself.

Every moment before they were a they, a we, a couple, two people indisputably joined, was nearly as titillating a series of memories as those which came after. Their long conversations in the library that soon turned into offers and eager acceptances of tea in one or the others’ room that turned with equal swiftness into routine, their every spare moment spent in each other’s company on increasingly threadbare pretenses. Their trips to everywhere, every city Emmrich had long since given up hope he would see; Rook, intrepid adventurer though she was, strangely averse to venturing anywhere without him. The shameful nights right here in his room doing exactly this, teasing himself to fantasies of what it would feel like for the door to open and the woman at whose side he’d spent the day to find him on wanton display, his hand on his erection and her name on his tongue, his eyes pleading, willing her to see the whole debauched tableau — his undoing — for what it was: his supplication to the wonder that was Rook; to her strength, her fortitude, the wisdom that defied her age, the steel that overlay her bottomless well of compassion. Emmrich had never really followed the Chantry, never felt compelled to worship any particular deity, but he’d spent those first long, lonely nights at the Lighthouse stroking himself and praying to her — Rook, Rook, please, let me, see me, forgive me, love me, please — before slapping his free hand across his mouth to cover his final, exultant groan and spilling himself across his own stomach in her praise.

They would have been unforgivable, those nights — lapses in propriety Emmrich could never admit to and still call himself a gentleman —had Rook not redeemed them, as she did all his imperfections: taking his failings, his fears, his flaws, and transmuting them to gold through the power of own attentions. Those awkward flirtations and earnest compliments. The sweet, subtle touches she offered as they stumbled together through forests and wetlands and uneven city streets, the hand always ready to catch him and steady him on his feet and which lingered on his arm for too long after. The quiet tilt of her head as she sought his permissions — ‘Is this alright?’ before seating herself closer to him on the sofa at tea; ‘Is that bad?’ after an unexpected compliment took him aback — always solicitous of his every feeling, his comfort paramount.

Were it her hand on his pathetically aching cock, Emmrich knew, she would never have treated it so harshly.

He shifted again in his seat, eyes open now and glazed with need and misery and exhaustion and love as he unwrapped his hand from his length, flushed red with hot blood and abuse, and called up another memory — he had so many to choose from, more than any man deserved — of Rook, here, on the rug, on her knees. He could almost see her face glowing in the waning firelight, lips parted, tongue dancing behind them in anticipation as she unwrapped his waistcoat like silk from a gift, impatient fingers fumbling his cock from his many layers, petting and caressing the taut flesh with such reverence an impartial observer might think it were he, not she, who who was the work of art, the miracle at which to marvel. Emmrich swept the pad of his thumb as tenderly as he could manage across the head once, twice, then, craning his hand at an awkward angle, drew it down the vein on the far side, threaded through three days worth of appallingly unkempt hair to cradle balls swollen with an equal time’s neglect — a retracing of Rook’s initial trail; a pilgrimage in her honour. And a poor imitation. He could not recreate the soft, sweet drag of her nails, nor the little hum of awed satisfaction she gave at the collection of pre-ejaculate that welled approvingly at his tip. He let his hand travel back up and his thumb catch the moisture, as she did, and stopped himself just short of bringing the digit to his mouth.

Rook very much had.

His weary mind layering the memory of over his solitary present, Emmrich watched through bleary eyes as the vision of Rook lapped experimentally at her finger, then, on discovering she liked his taste, dipping her head and trying to coax more of it from his quivering cock with petal-soft lips and tongue. He groaned now as he’d groaned then. The false, flickering picture of Rook met his eyes. Hers sparkled. She loved when he groaned; craved his every inelegant, unstaunchable sound nearly as much as he did hers. It was a devastating discovery. And Emmrich had known in that moment, as Rook’s lips quirked and her shining eyes dropped again to her work, and whimper after undignified whimper stole up his throat and past his pursed lips despite his brain’s express command — his own body defecting from his rule to hers — that this was no seasonal flower of affection, no last, lovely lark before he gave himself over to lichdom.

He loved her. He loved her. He loved her.

He could hide it, deny it, wrestle it away from his tongue so he did not accidentally say it to her and destroy the young, fragile flower of her affection with his overeager hands, but he could not stop the beat of it in his chest, the pump of it through his veins, the reality of it in every feeling part of him as she murmured his name like a spell against his own flesh, guiding him irrevocably up and over the edge.

The memory of that delicious orgasm, like his current pulse, was loud in Emmrich’s ears. His heart beat against his chest, ready to burst from him and set out to find its keeper. And yet… in another perverse punishment of fate, he could feel his cock flagging slightly in his tired, trembling hand. His body, so reliant on ritual, knew this wasn’t right, wasn’t the proper order of things. It was too soon. His own release came last, always last. And only after as many of hers as he could benevolently wring.

Rook’s orgasms were essential to Emmrich. Visible evidence of her enjoyment of him, a tangible measure of how much she needed him? It was an addiction, a compulsion. There was no stressor, no insecurity, no fear that could not be quieted — temporarily, at least — by her lilt of elation when he slipped inside her, her unpracticed chorus of irrepressible, glorious praise. Rook, who routinely took blows from Antaam and ogres and Venatori assassins without so much as a grunt, could not keep quiet when he touched her. The noise she had emitted at the first brush of his lips against her neck in the Memorial Gardens was a sound Emmrich would take like treasure to his grave. She could barely stand, he remembered, his own knees collapsing to the sides of the chair, too weak to stay upright as he tried to recapture the feeling of that day’s unexpected splendor and will it toward his waning cock. He had done so little, not a fraction of what he’d wanted. A few well-controlled kisses to her lips, the line of her jaw, the column of her throat, a brief, initial foray of his fingers into the dip of her waist, over the clothed swell of her hip. All quite appropriately restrained. And yet, Rook’s response…

It had shocked Emmrich, those noises; worked some mysterious, uncatalogued magic against his every nerve, setting them alight. It had required all his prodigious self-control to pull away. Only later, when they had returned to the Lighthouse and the echoes had faded enough for him to think clearly again, had he made some sense of them. Rook had spent her life developing tolerances to every sort of pain, but she had no defence against pleasure.

After which realisation, touching her became his favourite indulgence.

A solicitous hand to her lower back, a brief stroke of gloved fingers over her knuckles, bruised and bare; an innocent tuck of fallen hair behind her ear: all left her bright-eyed and breathless. Then later, when they had carved out enough time alone and uninterrupted to explore each other fully at last, Emmrich had found there was no greater euphoria than bringing the hero of Thedas to hysteric, tearful climax — once, twice, thrice — until she broke underneath him and was scrabbling at his shoulders, his hands, his hair, dragging him to her mouth where she could whimper against his lips ‘fuck me fuck me Emmrich please’ and he could do nothing but passionately obey.

The withering fire spit a small, glowing ember onto the carpet next to Emmrich’s foot. He kicked it away with a grunt: half exasperation, half despair. He clung to the memory, tried to bury his senses inside it, but memory and his own hand were simply not enough to encourage his cock back to true, productive hardness. It floundered in that miserable in-between place — too swollen to return comfortably to his trousers, too flaccid to properly stroke — as frustrated as he at the disruption in The Order of Things, confused and disapproving at this sudden return to masturbation now it knew the ministrations of perfection.

And a new thread of panic needled its way under Emmrich’s gross amalgamation of emotions, a sudden idea prompting a mirthless laugh that, in the lonely room, sounded more like an aborted scream. He was as trapped as Rook. A prisoner in his own body. The body he had had kept at her persuasions. And it was she alone who could rescue him from it.

The stark truth of this galled him. The tattered remnants of Emmrich's pride rebelled against the thought. He had grieved loss of love before, too many times. It had stung, wounded, ached, left him angry, miserable, despondent, but never before had he been trapped by it. There had always been a way forward, a light at the end of the tunnel: a new project to be started, some new principle of magic to be discovered, a new room of the Necropolis to be unearthed. Even when he’d turned the corner onto fifty, ringing in that fateful occasion alone, he’d refused to succumb to despair. He turned his mind to new horizons. He would devote himself to Manfred, to lichdom, put to rest, at last, the dreams of his youth: marriage, children, family, belonging utterly to one person, a love eternal.

Until Rook had resurrected them. With an ease that humbled even a senior necromancer and taught him a bit of empathy for those frightened by the art. She had raised his hopes not just to life, but to a greater measure of life than they’d known in years, decades.

And then she had taken them with her with she disappeared into the Fade.

The dizzy sensation of his mind trying to wrap itself around a loss too expansive, too unreal to fathom was familiar, but no less excruciating for it. Emmrich squeezed his eyes shut again as the nausea hit him. His hand fell limp against his leg, abandoning his half-hearted erection as his stomach contracted, then heaved. But there nothing in it to purge. Emmrich wondered without much interest when he had last eaten. Or drank anything — his tongue flicked weakly across his lips. Bone dry. Some instinct for survival no amount of despair could wholly kill urged him to find drink.

Emmrich’s eyes fluttered open and gazed blurrily at the glass and the bottle of something rare and expensive and strong he’d taken care and no small pleasure in purchasing not so long ago and whose name could not have mattered less to him now on a shelf overhead and a few steps to his right. But a quick survey of his shaking legs confirmed they were not yet up to bearing his weight. And surely alcohol was not advisable in his current state?

The ludicrous thought conjured a mirthless smile that cracked Emmrich’s bottom lip and twisted into a grimace of pain as his brain brought forth, unbidden, the memory of the last drinking binge in which he had indulged.

It was the evening after Aelia’s defeat, the party in Neve’s honour at the Cobbled Swan, and both he and Rook had indulged in more alcohol than either generally imbibed. This resulted in a giddy recklessness on Emmrich’s part and, on Rook’s, an uncharacteristically open demonstrativeness at the Swan, which evolved into a ferocious display of unbridled lust the very second they had stepped from the the Eluvian — and how he’d managed to stumble up the winding stairs to his room with her legs wrapped round his waist and her tongue down his throat Emmrich never knew — and, finally, settled into a a certain quiet thoughtfulness as they lay in his bed together, her wild high spirits fading before her usual armor of impenetrable humour could be replaced. She’d leaned over him, head in one hand, hair spilling across his pillow, while the other traced the bones of his face with the sort of fond smile that made Emmrich seriously consider whether he might cast a spell that would stretch the moment into eternity, anything to keep her looking at him just like that always. And, under the influence of her open affection and the alcohol, he’d summoned the courage to voice the question that haunted his nights:

��Where do you plan to go when all of this is done?’

And instead of a joke, a clever misdirect, a witticism, she’d said merely, ‘I don’t know,’ all quiet contemplation. ‘I rarely plan that far ahead.’ Her nail mapped a path along his nose, his moustache, his lips, before adding: ‘But I’ve been thinking lately… I might be ready for a change. It might be… nice to start fresh somewhere new.’

‘Nevarra is nice this time of year,’ Emmrich had ventured, his own hand cautiously tracing her hipbone, her waist, wrapping around her back, ready to catch her and hold her in place should she show any signs she might run. But—

‘So, I’ve heard,’ was all Rook said, and it was not banter. She met his eyes, hers full of equal parts nerves and hope. ‘I think I’d quite like to see it. If I had a guide.’

And oh, she had a guide. Her words and the raw, radiant honesty in her face had sent a fresh surge of blood to Emmrich’s core and inspired the second bout of love-making in minutes — the first time since his distant youth he could claim such a feat.

And, as if it too wished to live forever in that memory, Emmrich could feel his cock grow again, swelling proudly against his slack hand. He looked down as if to be sure. The dim outline of his erection was blurry for some reason beyond the dying light. He blinked. Tears slid noiselessly down his cheeks. Emmrich did not bother wiping them away but set his hand to work again, if at a more subdued pace: the solemn march of a funeral procession through the Memorial Gardens. Where he had first brought Rook all these weeks— or were they months, now? — ago.

Enthused by her intelligent questions, appreciative of her respect for the dead, surprised and - he could not pretend otherwise even then - thrilled at her obvious flirtations, it was the first time Emmrich had slipped and referred to Rook out loud as ‘my dear’, though he'd caught himself thinking it more than once; and the first time he had allowed his mind to wander to thoughts of her, thoughts of them, as he lay later in the first of what would be many cold baths. He drew on the memory, now, let his hand remember that first, forbidden touch, the flickering candle flame of maybes, of perhaps, of possibilities.

He ought to have known a love grown in a graveyard would be doomed to early death. Only Rook had never felt like death or doom, only new life and new potentials, spring and sun and warmth. Emmrich ran the hand not guiding his cock methodically towards orgasm like a distracted wisp down his own clothed thigh, remembering Rook’s. Rook’s legs, all firm muscle and smooth skin. Even marred by scars, she was heaven to caress: always warm and willing under his hands, whatever part of her he touched surging up to meet him, like it was her instinct to be pressed against him, to be part of him, as desperate to receive as he was to give.

Because Rook was meant to be part of him, Emmrich had been so sure of it. Surely, she was the culmination of decades spent in search of redamancy. So why wasn’t she here?

She was supposed to be, she’d promised she would be.

‘We’ll talk back home, Emmrich, I promise,’ she’d said, and he had trusted her. He had walked through fire and blight under the implicit understanding that she would get them both through it, that they would return to the Lighthouse — to home — gods defeated and their war won at last. That they would separate from the others as soon as they were tactfully able and consummate his contrition, her forgiveness, and their victory as it was always meant to be: Rook settled on top of him, his body her throne, her head tossed back and hair tumbling down her breasts as she worked herself towards a well-deserved ecstasy, her hands palming her own abdomen, desperate to feel him inside her, until finally collapsing across his chest; and Emmrich would roll her tenderly down to his sheets and whisper the words he ought to have said the night before they left, then slip the ring — his mother’s ring, with its modest band and solitary gemstone, that he had kept all these years in readiness for the person who would appreciate it for the treasure it was — onto Rook’s slender finger, and twine it with his, the matching set of gold clinking gently together as he pushed deeper, as deep as the physics of mortal flesh would allow, into her body until they were one, inseparable being.

But she hadn’t come back. Rook had broken her promise. She'd left him to return alone, to this pitiful imitation of what should have been. Exactly as he had his whole life. For the first time since Emmrich had known her, Rook had failed.

Despair grew claws. Furious fire fueled the heat in Emmrich’s belly and his hand thudded against his groin as he thrust against it, punishing himself for the uncharitable thought. Rook had not failed through any fault or misstep of her own. His Rook was never thoughtless, never careless in battle, even if she often looked it. It was the first thing Emmrich had noticed about her. He had been overawed to see her throw herself at scores of demons and intruding Venatori and somehow slide and dance through their blades like all the evils of the world could not touch her. And perhaps, hindsight decided, it was that very first moment, that first hour in Rook’s presence, that she had slipped herself under his skin. She was untouchable, and he wanted to touch; unshakeable and he wanted to undo her; carefully, lovingly unravel the mystery of Rook, of why such a beautiful, brilliant creature gave all her attention to a world of unworthy things.

To him.

A whole sampling of heroes waited at her beck and call, all experts in their fields and younger and with more to give than he, and Rook had chosen him as her safe place, her anchor, her hidden source of strength.

‘I need you, Emmrich,’ she’d said at Weisshaupt, when Ghilan’nain’s face had first appeared in the cloud and Emmrich’s courage, always brittle, had buckled at last. ‘We can do this if we stick together,’ she’d said, placing both hands on his face, her warmth seeping into him. ‘But I can’t do it without you. Are you with me?’

‘I’m with you.’

Now, just as he had then, Emmrich whispered the words out loud, his free hand cupping his own cheek in torturous imitation of Rook’s. He had looked into her eyes and it had been love even then. Whether or not he had properly named it at the time, his fate had been sealed.

‘I’m with you,’ he said aloud again, the words tumbling automatically from his lips as his other hand bounced along his shaft, more enthusiastic than he’d been through the whole unhappy endeavour, envisioning Rook’s own hand slipped into his as she’d led him onto the broken remains of Weisshaupt’s walls. ‘I’m with you, darling,’ he murmured frantically into the empty air. ‘I’m all yours.’

Delirium made Emmrich wonder if Rook could somehow hear him. After all, they were both in the Fade. Did she know what he was doing? Could his need for her reach her, wherever she was? And so drunk on desire and fatigue was he, he could not even feel shame at the thought. She would understand, she had always understood. Even when he’d lost himself completely the night before that fateful fight, insisted in his fear she’d be better off without him…

‘At your age…’ he had said. And, ‘It isn’t fair to burden you…’ he had tried. But—

‘No,’ had been Rook’s firm answer. ‘This isn’t about me. It’s about you. You’re scared. You don’t know what’s going to happen. And if this is what you need to do now to feel like you’re in control of something, that’s fine if it gets you through tomorrow, but don’t pretend it’s about me. You’re too old for that.’

Emmrich let his nails drag alone the sensitive skin just a shade too hard, enough to hiss at the sensation, a light lick of pain swimming alongside the release he could feel finally teasing the base of his spine. Rook knew him better than he knew himself. She had cut through his fears and illusions alike. She would understand his need. She would help him now, as she’d always helped him. Some last rational part of Emmrich’s brain questioned this logic but he could not make it out and did not care to now. He straightened himself in the chair, steadying his feet against the ground as he pumped with fervour, imagining - or the Fade, perhaps, providing - the feel of gentle fingers wrapping themselves around his, lending him strength.

‘That’s right,’ Rook would say if she were here, just as she had said so many times against his lips when he was this close, this close. ‘Come for me, Emmrich, I want to feel it. Come for me, then come find me.’

‘Yes,’ Emmrich gasped aloud. ‘Yes, darling, for you. Anything for you.’

And he meant it. Anything she said, anything she wanted. He would give her everything just as soon as he got her back. And she would kiss his cheeks, first one then the other - and was it memory or the Fade's perfect air ghosting like petal-soft lips along his cheeks now? - and breathe her gratitude into his ear as she always did. As she had so many times and still not nearly enough. She would run her hand through his hair and down his spine and hold him to her as she always did when he was about to come, about to-

‘Rook,’ Emmrich said, deceptively calm, into the empty room. Then release overtook him.

He groaned; let himself groan because she would want to hear it, just as he let his own seed coat his hands, both of them. He always hated that part, hated for his hands to feel sticky, but Rook never shied away from mess. And for her, Emmrich would debase himself, welcome discomfort and chaos.

‘Maker, you’re gorgeous when you do that.’

He heard her words in his head over the sound of his thudding heart. They made his whole body twitch and shiver, just as he had the first time Rook had said them, and he slumped over his ruined lap as if he might bury his face in her phantom neck, breathe her in again. But there was no body to catch him, and only his own strong smell in his nostrils as she sucked in rattling breaths.

Other unpleasant sensations were returning, too, as physical need abated: his numb left foot, the screaming cramp in his hand, and, lurking underneath them, the spectres of shame and disgust and ever-present despair. Yet, something kept them at bay. A ghost of the glow that always came in the aftermath of Rook, when Emmrich gave himself to her completely and she caught him, always caught him, clutching him to her, letting him shake or weep or murmur ridiculous endearments even he could not understand. She’d stroke his hair, murmur into his neck how well he’d done.

And, just as his body in its need could not grasp her absence, so now it continued to respond as if she were there, letting him linger in a grace undeserved. With it blanketing him, Emmrich could think clearly for the first time since he’d watched her disappear.

Rook was lost, but she was not dead. She was trapped but she was not gone, not forever. She was trapped in the Fade, and the Fade always provided a way out, and he, the Fade expert, would find the way it. And find her. Just as she’d found him in the depths of the dark Necropolis and dragged him back into the light of day. It had been meant. They had been meant. And whether that was true or post-orgasmic bliss, Emmrich would make it so. He had dreamed into her into existence once, he could do it again.

But not, he decided, while dead-on-his-feet and dripping three days worth of pent-up release onto the rug.

Uncurling his spine, Emmrich got to his feet, sticky hands clenched at his side, ready to care for the rest of his body’s needs again. Somewhere in the Fade, he imagined Rook — his Rook — smiling, and knew she would approve.

#emmrook #emmrich volkarin #emmrich x rook

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