Chapter Text
It is not often, but sometimes—when he has not sent word—she goes through the eluvians to Vigil’s Keep to check upon her Warden. She may never be able to step through the mirror quietly enough that his elven ears do not hear, but if he is not in a mood to be disturbed he will pretend not to have noticed.
Neither of them are so fragile as to truly need one another—or they’d like to think that, for even when they are withdrawn into themselves they cannot deny one another’s company. In those times, she will lay on his bed in silence and doze in silence before, eventually, leaving in silence. When their roles are reversed, he will sit on the floor at the foot of her bed, head tilted back to the ceiling and eyes closed. It is enough—it is allowable—to exist together.
That is more than they had either once hoped for, after all, and they will not begrudge the other the chance to enjoy this twist of fate.
But then there are nights like this, when the tang of blood is thick in the air, and Blight. Morrigan knows to undo her gloves and kick off her boots on her way to the bath. She has learned to expect anything from the simplest scene of a weary Warden reclining in a tub of steaming water to more gruesome sights, like the time she found him fishing metal hooks out from the meat of his shoulder with shaking fingers.
Tonight she strips down to her underlayers and steps into the washroom to find her love nearly asleep in the bath, his arms dangling over the sides—pale skin newly adorned with dark bruises and the raking wounds of a shriek’s claws. They have stopped weeping, but they are raw and deep, and his fingers still tremble with pain.
As she approaches, his lashes flutter, and the pale gray slivers of his eyes flash at her. She suspects immediately that he lost the strength to continue washing, or to lift himself out of the tub.
“Come now, let me see the damage,” she says crossly, but her chest is tight with that strange, wretched, wonderful emotion that might be love or might be terror. She slips her arms beneath his and heaves him up until he can get his feet beneath him without slipping. The grunt he makes is one of weariness only, and not of mortal agony.
It amuses some part of her to know the difference.
She keeps one hand on him as she comes around the side of the tub and steps inside. The water is lukewarm around her calves, and with a glance down she can see that the bath water is clean. Perhaps he had washed up before this, cleaned his wounds, and drawn a fresh bath. No wonder he is exhausted.
“How often must you turn your arms to ribbons before you learn to dodge, lazy bones?” she grouses, but she’s pleased that only his arms appear to be seriously injured. The rest of his pale body is a network of criss-crossing scars that is as esoteric as all her attempts to map the extant eluvians. Mottled bruises wrap around his ribs and hips and knees and—well, most of him.
He snorts softly. “I dodged plenty,” he retorts. “It only takes one bad step.”
Morrigan rolls her eyes, but she dutifully helps him lower back down into the water. His knees come up on either side of her as she joins him, and she moves her hands from his ribs to lift one of his injured limbs above the surface of the water. A touch of magic, and she can at least close the wounds to prevent infection. She concentrates on her task, reconnecting the tattered edges of pale skin across the ravines of torn flesh. She is so focused that she barely registers the shift, the slosh, the movement, as he raises his other, shaking hand to her face.
Morrigan startles when the backs of Halevune’s knuckles brush across her cheek, chasing a flyaway strand of her hair behind her ear. Their gazes lock over top the canvas of his arm, and she cannot help the faintest upward slant of her lips beneath the scrutiny of his elven eyes.