Work Text:
"A scar is what happens when word is made flesh." - Leonard Cohen
.
.
.
.
She lets him kiss her scars.
First, the one upon her brow; his lips brush it softly, tenderly, one hand curled at the base of her skull. She laughs, her breath warming the valley of his throat, lingering in the chambers of his heart. He smiles against her forehead, “ar lath ma,” he says. “Vhenan.”
His lips linger at the corner of her mouth, but he never commits to a kiss; instead, they press to her fluttering jugular, the jut of her collarbone beneath her skin. Lavellan sucks in a breath through her teeth.
He unlaces her tunic with hands deft from years of spellcasting, pressing the flat of his palm against her belly, dragging up, up, and her fingers find the collar of his robe. “Solas,” she husks, and he hushes her, mouth and tongue tracing the path between her breasts, outlining the raised scar there, softly, reverently. Each of her scars tells a story, each a page in the novel of her life, and he wishes to memorize it, to the very last syllable.
She lays beneath him on a pallet of furs. She is beautiful in the way an earthquake is beautiful, destroying everything around it in seconds, in a heartbeat, so it can all be rebuilt anew. Solas feels his throat seize.
She murmurs something in elvish, the flange of her vowels darkened in the firelight. He swallows, moves to cup the heel of her foot in his palm. Calloused from years of wandering, of hunting and fishing, with the sun barely skulking above the mountainside. He can see it perfectly in his mind.
She brings him from his reverie with a laugh, wiggling her toes. He kisses them, too.
Her breeches are discarded somewhere in the tent. There are scars all about her legs, in the dip of her kneecaps, the swell of her thighs. He swears an ancient oath, and she sighs when his fingernails drag up from her ankles. He bends to kiss the point of each, to scrape his teeth against the little nicks and cuts covering them as lace.
Her knees are next. Her thighs - they flex against his cheek, and he soothes her with words of endearment - she moans anyway. Her hipbones are smooth against his lips, her belly soft, tense, salted with sweat.
His hands settle firmly against her waist, thumbs pressing down into her navel. “Vhenan,” he repeats. He touches his forehead to her own, noses touching, her breath against his face. She is silent, but words are paltry things, they turn to rust with everything else in the world. So he holds her and wishes the night to never end. But it must.
.
.
.
.
She falls asleep in his arms, and when she rises in the morning, he is gone.