Work Text:
There was something oddly soothing about the quiet domesticity of washing a veritable mound of dishes before the crackling fireplace. Just the steady motion of the sponge against the plates and the light clink as he stacked the clean dishes on a towel next to the basin to dry.
And Rook, sitting quietly in the corner, feet tucked under her and her nose buried in a book.
After what happened with Zara, he couldn’t quite fathom how she could unwind around him, but she kept unobtrusively seeking out his company. He did his best to focus on the task before him, instead of the slow turning of her pages, the movement of her hand as she kept tucking that same stubborn strand of hair back behind her ear or the way she absentmindedly pulled her lower lip between her teeth.
He didn’t need to look up to notice when she moved; even the sound of her steps over the tiled floor seemed superfluous, given the way his skin broke into goosebumps, thousands of tiny hairs straining in her direction whenever she drew near, like a sixth sense just for her.
It was maddening.
He deliberately kept his eyes on the dishes as she stepped up behind him, stacking the last clean pieces on the pile.
“You pulled a muscle earlier, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” It wasn’t anything she ought to worry about.
“Uh-huh. So it’s just a coincidence that you’ve barely moved your left arm since we fought that Ogre?”
Lucanis tried to suppress a grimace; he hadn’t thought he’d been that obvious about it.
“I’m fine.”
“Sure,” she drawled, and he stilled when her hand landed lightly on his shoulder, sliding down his back with gentle pressure until he felt her jab a knuckle into the knot between his shoulder blades.
There was no hiding his flinch and the sharp hiss of breath between his teeth.
“Idiot,” she muttered, and started gently rubbing the sore spot.
He hesitated, wanting to lean into her touch and step away to put some distance between them in equal measure.
“You don’t have to …”
“You don’t have to be in pain when I can do something about it,” she countered.
He risked a glance over his shoulder (wincing again as the motion pulled at that spot of tension) to find her scowling at him and gave in.
Saying no to her wasn’t his strong suit. It was especially difficult when his body screamed at him not to lose that tenuous contact with her.
He glanced away again, facing forward.
“If you insist.”
She just huffed, annoyed and amused and unrelenting. And then her other hand began to knead his rhomboid muscles on the opposite side, and he couldn’t help the sigh that escaped his lips as he felt his shoulders droop.
Her motions were slow and careful, steady pressure easing him into her touch.
For a minute, she just worked in silence, working on that knot that restricted his range of movement.
Then she slowed, her pressure easing.
“... you know, this would be a lot more effective without the shirt on,” she remarked cautiously, hesitation weighing every word.
He froze, breath caught in his throat.
Want to feel. Her hands. On your skin, Spite jeered, materializing beside him.
Lucanis whipped his head around as he felt a flash of heat shooting up his neck. “That’s not…!”
True? But it was. He ached for her the comfort of her touch, her warmth.
When he was alone with his thoughts (or as alone as he could be, these days), his mind kept returning to the feeling of her arms around him, her breath on his neck, her skin under his fingertips, her lips on his cheek.
All the things he couldn’t have, shouldn’t want.
It didn’t help that Spite kept throwing these memories at him whenever he was fretting, either.
Her hands stilled on his back.
“It’s ok, I understand if that would make you uncomfortable,” she said hastily. “I guess it is a bit much. I probably shouldn’t have …”
Her touch grew lighter, as if she was about to pull her hands away, and something in him cracked, desperate to keep her there, just a little longer.
“No, it’s ok, I just … it’s just Spite,” he interjected, frantic to let her know that he wasn’t offended, that he didn’t object to her touch.
Maker, did he not object to her touch.
His hands flew to his lapel pins, removing the little crows and beginning to unbutton his vest before he could remember why this was a terrible idea that he really shouldn’t indulge in.
He caught her gaze when he draped his clothes over the back of her chair, noting her wide eyes and the flush in her cheeks before she glanced away, clearing her throat.
“Ah… this’ll probably be easier if you sit,” she explained, directing him to settle sideways on one of the chairs so she could reach all of his back.
He felt the pinprick thrill of magic behind his eyes as she pulled a trickle of power from the Fade. What had once been a warning signal was now a commonplace sensation, almost mundane, sharp edges smoothed away by the weight of living practically on top of each other for so long.
He never would have thought he’d ever spend so much time among mages he wasn’t paid to kill, but now he did, so familiar with the echoes of their castings large and small that he no longer had to see them to know who was working magic around him, each of them carrying their own signature sensation.
Neve was the first wave of frost on a winter morning; Bellara was all crackling ozone, like the tendrils of a thunderstorm; Emmrich was grave dust and empty hallways, each of their specializations making them easy to identify.
Rook was more difficult, versatility muddling the taste of her magic, petrichor and smoke and something spicy.
“What are you doing?”
“Warming my hands.”
Ah, right. She did that a lot, using her magic for small, mundane things, like keeping her tea - or his coffee - at just the right temperature, warming the dishwashing water or summoning a cool breeze when they had been sparring.
Like it was just another kind of tool.
No wonder the telltale prickle of her magic had become such a familiar background noise.
When she touched his shoulders again, her hands were almost hot to the touch.
She rested them on his shoulders for a moment, allowing him to acclimate to the sensation, and he could feel her warmth seeping right through his skin. When she began to work, her hands were bleeding heat as she moved methodically along the lines of his tension, from his neck down over his shoulder blades down to his lower back. There was a relief to that warmth, helping to relax his muscles as she slowly built her pressure, careful not to startle him.
“Fasta vass, you’re tense,” she muttered, briefly shaking out her hands.
His eyelids prickled as she tugged on the Veil again.
“This should only tickle a little; please tell me if it stings, it’s been a while since I’ve done this,” she explained, and he straightened.
There was indeed a curious tingling sensation as she brought her hands to his skin again, a bit like static electricity, but not uncomfortable.
“What is that?”
“Tiny bit of lightning; it helps me loosen those knots without applying so much pressure that it hurts us both.”
He had to swallow an undignified moan when she ran her thumbs along both sides of his spine to make him let go of a strain he had been holding on to for weeks, feeling his head drop and his shoulders slump.
“How did you learn to do this?” he asked to distract himself from the way the tightness slipping from his back seemed to transform into a different kind of tension at his core.
“I told you I have military training, right?”
“Mhm.” Words were a lot of work right now, when he wanted to melt into a puddle beneath her steady hands.
“Well, training could be a lot, and I don’t really remember who started it, but at some point we decided to sit down in something like massage lines. At the end of particularly grueling days, we would just rub the tension out of each other’s shoulders. I ended up at the start of one more often than not, but it was nice to feel included, and it did teach me a trick or two.”
She focused on a particularly stubborn knot then, and he forgot how to think for a moment when he felt it finally loosen up, leaning into her touch.
It took him a minute to recognize the forced cheer in her words.
“Why?”
He felt her shrug through her fingertips on his skin. “Not very many elves around there, and even the Soporati rarely see us as anything other than servants and slaves. It wasn’t personal, but the whole “If there’s a rattus around, they’re meant to do something for you, not the other way around” is pretty ingrained.”
He froze, started to move away, and her hands closed around his shoulders to hold him in place.
“Hold on, I’m not done with you yet.”
“I don’t want to make you feel like a servant,” he said tersely, feeling her warm breath on his neck as she huffed in fond amusement.
“You’re not. I consider this a privilege, because I know you don’t much care for physical contact. Which is perfectly reasonable, given what you’ve been through,” she continued quietly, her touch softening along with her words.
He couldn’t exactly tell her how much he cared for her contact; how much he longed to reach out and pull her close, to bury his nose in her hair and feel her pressed against him.
“I don’t mind this,” he murmured, barely louder than a whisper.
“And I’m sorry that you had to grow up with people looking down on you.”
Her hands slid downward from his shoulders to rub small circles over his middle back.
“It’s alright. As I said, I know it wasn’t personal. Well, for most of them, anyway, and I wasn’t exactly above putting my foot down with the ones who did do it on purpose. They never did it for very long after that.”
There was a decidedly smug note to her voice when she said that.
“I’ve just … never been very good at belonging,” she remarked wistfully. “Too pointy eared for the humans I trained with, too human-raised for the elves I wanted to help. And too much trouble to keep around for the people I chose to work with.”
His heart constricted at the barely disguised yearning behind her offhand words.
I want to belong.
Always standing on the outside, looking in. It was a feeling he knew better than he liked to admit. There was a difference between knowing your place and feeling like you belonged somewhere.
Or with someone.
Was that why she took such pains to make each member of their team feel welcome and cared for?
You belong with me, is what his heart wanted to say. Selfish. He didn’t belong anywhere, not anymore; not with the crows, not as he was; not to his only remaining family, not even to himself.
What is. Belonging?
Lucanis shook his head. “Not now, Spite.”
“What is it?” Rook’s hand’s slowed in the process of rubbing the last kinks out of his neck.
“He wants to know what belonging means,” Lucanis explained after a moment’s hesitation.
She hummed thoughtfully as she resumed her gentle kneading.
“That’s … difficult to explain. It’s like … knowing where your home ist, and who your friends are. It’s having people who understand you and accept you as you are without judgement, and having a place where you feel safe.”
Like the feeling of standing in the circle of her arms.
But Rook belongs. here!
“It’s not that simple,” he said quietly after relaying the demon’s words to Rook.
“Lucanis is right,” Rook added softly, “this is just … a waystation. The Lighthouse doesn’t belong to us - we’re only guests here.”
There was a pause, long enough that he thought she was finished, before she spoke up again, quiet words rippling through the silence like stones dropped in a pond.
“And we’re all just here to kill the gods; once that’s done, everyone will go their separate ways again.”
And I’ll be alone.
Rook is. Sad?
Yes.
His hands flexed, aching to reach out, to take her hand, to pull her into his arms.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he said instead. “I don’t think this team will just quietly disappear out of each other’s lives. Bellara will probably end up writing a paper with Emmrich - about me, if I’m not careful.” That drew a chuckle from her.
“If she doesn’t straight up move in with Neve to write down all her stories so the papers stop getting it wrong. Taash already wants to be a Crow, so I would be surprised if they didn’t swing by Treviso at least occasionally, if only to help us drive the Antaam out of Antiva. Davrin might be a little more difficult to pin down, but I bet Assam will make sure he gets to see his friends again. And Harding is still writing to her friends in the Inquisition, so I can’t imagine her not staying in touch.”
“And you?” she asked in a small voice, gently brushing her thumbs along the sides of his neck.
His breath caught, heart stuttering in his chest. Such a small, innocent question shouldn’t invoke such complicated feelings. With a deep breath, he turned, needing to see her face even if it meant her hands slipping from his skin.
“You saved me, Rook. I owe you my life, my home, and my freedom. I will always be there when you need me.”
Wide eyes stared back at him, amber glinting in the firelight, hands still half outstretched between them. There was a tension in the air like threads of glass, taut and glittering and fragile.
“Lucanis …”
Then she blinked, dropping her hands to clasp them behind her back as a piece of firewood split with a loud crack, breaking the spell.
He couldn’t help but notice the blush in her cheeks as she cleared her throat and glanced away.
“How’s your range of movement now?”
His turn to blink, remembering why she had put her hands on him in the first place.
A slow roll of his neck and shoulders proved that she did indeed know a trick or two; he hadn’t felt this relaxed since well before the Ossuary.
“Much better, thank you.”
A small smile, there and gone again.
“I’m glad.”
Then her eyes flickered down, reminding him of his shirt and vest still discarded on the back of his chair, and she turned around to busy herself with the dishes he had set aside to dry.
“Why don’t I put these away for you.”
By the time Taash strode in to look for snacks, he was just closing the last buttons on his vest while Rook was stacking the last plates in the cupboard.
Considering the smirk they wore as they glanced between the two of them, nostrils flaring, he was rather glad that they refrained from commenting as he pointed out the bowl of leftovers.