Work Text:
9:41- 9:42 (who knows) Dragon
Location: Skyhold
“What are you reading?” Carver asked curiously as he glanced at Rowan sprawled out on her stomach, lying across the silk sheets of her bed. Her boot-less feet wiggled in response, her lips moving with the words of the book she was reading. She finished the section before placing one long finger as a marker, and looking up at Carver, a smile on her lips that sparkled in her green eyes. Carver’s heart flipped over in his chest. Maker, it was good to see her smiling like that. And no one was dead. At least… that he knew of. He hadn’t checked under her bed.
“It’s just a book I found.” Her answer was simple, but by the way her smile curled at the edges, Carver knew there was more to it than that.
“Oh? You went to the library? I thought you didn’t like that elf apostate on the first floor?”
“I don’t have an opinion of him. If that’s who the Inquisitor wants to consult, far be it for me to judge. I did my world-saving for this lifetime. I just don’t like his questions about Justice and the whole” -she waved her hands about exaggeratedly as she rolled her eyes- “Fade, spirit, Blackmarsh thing. I hope he never finds out about the bullshit I had to go through in the Temple of the Sacred Ashes.” Her tone was light, but her brow had furrowed as she’d continued talking. Rowan never spoke about her time during the Blight, and Carver never pushed. Over the years, he had pieced some of it together, but had managed to restrain himself from pumping her for information. It sounded like she didn’t understand a lot of what had happened herself.
“But no! I didn’t get this book from the library. I uh… I borrowed it.” Carver quirked his head in response. He knew exactly that that meant.
“Who did you borrow it from?” He asked feigning nonchalance as he dropped himself into the sturdy wooden chair by the table in Rowan’s room. He’d found with Rowan it was best to know who to expect to come crashing in with a furious interruption. Carver rested his forearms on his knees as he fixed Rowan with a steady blue stare. She squirmed.
Rowan murmured something under her breath, tucking her hair behind an ear as she became very interested in whatever she was reading. Carver cleared his throat.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that?”
“Maker’s balls Carver, when did you turn into such a choirboy?” Rowan sighed dramatically, but she was looking at him with a wolfish grin.
“I just want to know who to expect battering down our door shouting for you to return their possessions.” Carver tried to look stern, but his mouth pressed into a tight-lipped little grin.
“I’m not worried. You’ll protect me, Hero.” Rowan batted long dark lashes as her voice picked up a sweet quality that better suited a delicate lady than a hardened rogue. Of course, someone would have to inform the chills running down Carver’s spine of that particular inconsistency. Her words slipped out, effortless as they rode her exhalation, lingering notes of years spent in Orlais even more pronounced. Her lips curled in a way that… was very… distracting.
“Oh, and I borrowed the book from Seeker Pentaghast.”
Carver snapped back into focus with a rapidity that made his head spin. Had she just… Did he hear her right?
“You… you what?” He was sputtering, bolt upright in his chair and staring at Rowan in horror. She had calmly returned to her text, as if she noticed nothing amiss.
“Please tell me you didn’t just say… what I thought I heard you say…”
“Well… not so much as borrow as I found it in her things and thought it would be a laugh. This one is not by Varric, but she has those too.”
“Ro-… I-… How could you- … What were you-…“ Carver’s thoughts flew through his mind too quickly for his tongue to keep up or focus enough to get out a whole sentence. So Rowan had not simply borrowed the book – she had broken into the private quarters of the woman who had once been hunting her, and rifled through her belongings.
“Maker preserve us.” Carver moaned into his hands, fingers rubbing at his face wearily. He should have known better than to trust a smiling Rowan. He ran his hands through his hair, scalp tingling as the hairs bent in the direction opposite their normal.
Silence stretched between them as Carver eyed the door warily, and Rowan cheerily read her book. Something in her demeanor… something he had missed. Rowan had no patience for history or religion. Come to think of it, he could not remember the last time he saw her reading an actual bound book like that. Let alone one with the gaudy gilded pages. What sort of book had the tight-laced Seeker hidden away that could make Rowan giggle like that?
“What… what kind of book did you say it was?” Carver asked nonchalantly.
“It’s romance!” Rowan chirped happily, not bothering to tear herself from the page.
“You hate romance.” Carver argued stubbornly.
“Not all of it.”
More silence. Carver began to wonder if he should be elsewhere. Rowan was giggling and hungrily turning page after page of the book, feet wiggling in the air behind her merrily. She wouldn’t be causing any trouble for a while, and he hadn’t checked on Mors in a while. With Rowan running around robbing Templars, he shuddered to think of what his brother might be up to.
“Carver! Listen to this!” Rowan had rolled onto her back, holding the book over her as her braid trailed dangling over the edge of the bed. She adopted a strange, almost satirical reading voice.
“She trembled – like a leaf on the winds of a storm- as he seized her about the waist and stared longingly into her great, shining orbs. They were the blue of the deepest ocean, the brightest, clearest summer day. They were the blue of eternity.”
“Well shit.” Carver was staring at Rowan slack-jawed. She grinned up at him before continuing.
“The wind tossed her mane of fiery hair about her head, wreathing her in flame like a sacred – yet buxom statue of Andraste. He felt a tear in the corner of his eye and willed himself not to cry from the sheer beauty of her gentle countenance.”
A snort from Carver interrupted Rowan’s reading, and her last words were peppered with laughter.
“It’s terrible.” Carver said around the fingers he had pressed to his face to keep his laughter in check. His voice was muffled and strangled as he held the tide of his mirth at bay. Rowan giggled, flipping a few pages forward and scanning as Carver wrestled for control, face still hidden in his large hands.
“‘Oh Geoff, we can never be together, can’t you see that? Ted and I are soul-mates. We are destined. The Maker made us each for the other.’
“‘No!’ Geoff shouted, his chin cutting a defiant silhouette in the moonlight. ‘I won’t believe it! When I look at you, my heart aches and my loins burn for you. The way you are quivering, I know you feel the same!”
Carver erupted in laughter at this point, no longer able to contain himself. Rowan watched, eyes alight as his strong form doubled over, arms on his knees and wheezing as he gasped for breath. He laughed deep, a rumbling that she heard echo in his chest as it brought tears to his eyes. It was good to hear. He looked too much like he carried a weight on his shoulders these days, and the little lines that once marked the corners of his eyes had been replaced by tight, pursed lips and dark circles. When she left… If she had known he would go back to his brother… No, this was not the time for regrets. There was no way to take them back. Only to atone. And she would spend the few years she had remaining making up for the time they had been parted.
Carver had caught her staring, and he quirked his head curiously, laughter on his lips, his blue eyes brighter than she had seen them in days. Not wanting the fun to end, Rowan licked her lips and scanned the story for another excellent passage.
“In three powerful, gliding steps Geoff seized her in his brawny arms.”
“Wait, wasn’t she already in his arms?”
“He pressed his mouth to hers, hungry and burning, loins aflame with desire as he devoured her like the finest of cakes. – Carver, why don’t you ever devour me?” Rowan interrupted her own reading with a good-natured grin. Carver’s head perked up from where it drooped (face once again in his hands to muffle his laughter), dark eyebrows shooting upwards as his forehead wrinkled.
“Would you like me to?” Carver’s voice rippled in amusement, a glimmer of hopeful excitement underlying his words. He grinned, a wide, toothy grin that looked like it tasted of trouble.
“His tongue stabbed into her mouth, slick and hot as a brand, tussling with hers. Tongues twining and clashing, lips locked, they desperately fought for dominance in a fevered joust.”
“It does not say joust!” Carver was on his feet in his incredulity, hair wild and tousled and his clothing rumpled. It felt strange to be out of his armor so often in Skyhold, but he would adjust.
Rowan laughed, an easy tinkling sound that poured out of her. Every fiber of his being wanted that sound to continue – to never ever stop. She bit her lip as she smiled mischievously up at him, and he found himself staring again.
“It does say joust. The next paragraph says something about fencing. Carver!” Rowan squealed as Carver plucked the book from her hands.
After scanning the text and finding that it did indeed use words like ‘joust’ and ‘fence’ to describe the fictional couple’s embraces, Carver tossed it lazily over one shoulder. He dropped himself onto the bed beside Rowan and pulled her into the curve of his nearest arm.
She proved more welcoming to his attentions than he remembered, her body instinctively curling toward his, her eyes big and dark as her breath caught in her throat. She clutched at the neckline of his loose linen shirt, pulling as he rolled atop her, pressing her into soft, silky sheets. She was smiling, mirth bubbling out of her in an almost sunny disposition. Carver felt his face grow warm as he wondered how her laughter tasted.
“Well… then en guarde, Serah.”