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It comes on like the devouring storm. Only it isn’t some abstract, distant concept of emerald clouds, purple lightning and whipping wind that could peel the skin from your knuckles. It’s a downpour of emotion, of fear all consuming, a tingle in the base of the spine turned an encompassing din that rattles through the teeth and beats on the eardrums. Nails pressed to palms. Burning in the eyes like tears made of powdered glass. Twisting in bowel, like a ball of thorns in the gut. And in the mind, the maelstrom of thoughts, words, feelings, large and small melding like molten metal, hot and thick, conglomerating into something massive and terrible and unknowable to anyone who has not lived the very spitting agony of it.
Riven is brought to their knees by it. Hand extended outward, grasping at the arm of the chaise lounge in their chambers. Their heartbeat skips. Sweat beads on their brow. They feel sick, and they’re bringing up their supper before they can measure the weight of what exactly has fallen upon their narrow shoulders.
There have been signs leading up to this moment; agitation, insomnia, variable appetite. They’ve been drinking more to compensate for the lack of sleep, the unpleasant reality of piquing emotion. Things that they logically know they should be looking out for considering their history of emotional upset. But it has been years since they have truly broken, fallen to pieces like a vase smashed to oblivion on an unyielding stone floor.
It surges from within them now, dizzying, they sway and fall faint onto the velvet chaise. Their breath is ragged, palms sweaty, mouth sour.
The devouring storm. The words are recollected amidst a flurry of unhinged thoughts and impulses. A phrase, simple and concise. The death of the first expedition into the lands of Thedas proper. Perhaps the death of Rook, now that they lay in the tumult, swallowed up by the depth of their raw, unfettered emotion.
A peal of terrible laughter cuts through their teeth as the seethe, choking on the cruelty of it.
And they want to die.
They are dying.
Riven doesn’t hear the door slam open on its hinges. They don’t hear the thunder of heavy footsteps, bare, slapping across the stone floor.
“Rook?”
A voice rips through their reverie with all the grace of a bonesaw.
It’s Taash.
Maker, fuck it all, it’s Taash.
“Fuck off,” Riven manages, still recovering from the gutpunch of the abrupt onset of… whatever this is. The sickness. The malady that had prickled in their fingers and toes since their teen years. Like a ceaseless mange, prickling, spreading, infecting the folds of the hindbrain.
Taash ignores their sharp, uncharacteristic rudeness, and pauses at the puddle of vomit on the floor, “You sick?
Yes.
“No,” Riven grouses. And they manage to sit bolt upright, regaining a facade of normalcy. A show. A pantomime they must act out in order to run the qunari off before they…
Before what?
What have they done in the past? How have they coped?
The tattoos cover the scars now; they places where they let blood in an sour attempt cull the ache. Like letting steam out of a boiling pot before it blew its lid. That left them with nothing but shameful scars. Old war wounds won on the field of the endless battle of self determination. Riven’s fingers press into the fabric of their trousers, feeling the familiar ridges beneath.
They grind their teeth, hands fisting.
“What do you want, Taash?”
Taash, having rounded the chaise, looms over the elf like a promise of sanity. An anchor in that devastating, devouring storm. They are unperturbed by Riven’s apparent lack of hospitality.
“Riv.”
They don’t ask anything, but a question hangs in the air between them.
Riven tosses their legs haphazardly over the edge of the sofa and lets their head fall into their hands. A few strands of pale blonde hair have fallen loose of their bun, tickling the sides of their fingers.
“You’re breathin’’ hard.” Taash states, tone flat but their brow is raised, “You smell… wrong .”
Riven sniffs, chortles sordidly. Their voice is like shards of splintered glass upon their own wretched ears when they ask, half-playful, half-desperate of their almost-lover, “What do I normally smell like, Taash?”
They can tell that Taash is holding back from them, uncertainty keeping them at an arm’s length. And perhaps that is where they should remain. What is love to a broken thing?
“Pine. Evergreen. Worn leather. I’ve never smelled winter but you smell like it. Cold. Bright.”
Riven shudders, lifting their head, wetting their chapped lips.
Taash blinks, stepping forward, extending a large, warm hand through the blackness that engulfs Rook, “What’s happening?”
“I-
The tears come before the elf can formulate a response. They’re biting, sharp, frigid like frost on the eyelashes and stinging on the nose and cheeks. They cut limpid pathways over Riven’s tattooed face.
Taash kneels, always so certain, and cups the elf’s face in their large palms. Their thumbs brush Riven’s cheeks, wiping away the fresh tracks, tracing along the spines of snakes.
“I’m losin’ you?” Taash asks, voice soft low, tinged with fear.
Somehow they know the depth of it, like a knife of ice splintering the torso, carving the heart like a roasted bird. And of course they know. Riven has never met someone who knows them so inherently as Taash. Where Rook had seen the blinding, radiant truth of their identity, they now see the blackened heart of a tiny, wretched, broken thing.
Riven’s lips form around a dozen words between sobs, before they finally manage a croaked, “ Yeah .”
Taash nods pensively, green eyes deep as the sea, and just as unknowable.
Their mother has only been dead for two weeks. They’re still fucking grieving and yet Rook is burdening them with this teenaged, melodramatic, vashedan. The guilt twists beneath their lungs like a thousand little needle legged silverfish vying up from the blackened pit of their belly. Wretched, broken thing.
“You wanna hurt yourself?” Taash poses, stern.
Riven, shivering, sucks in a small, helpless breath and nods. Unable to speak through the tightness in their throat.
“You’ve hurt yourself before?”
Swallowing thickly, their words are somehow both pressured and achingly slow on their tongue, “When I was a kid. And, sometimes after that.”
The scars ache at the memory of rendered flesh. Like joints before rain. A flash of the blade.
“That’s stupid.”
Riven laughs through the tears, “I know, Taash.”
Taash purses their lips, watching the elf for a long moment before they finally take a seat on the couch beside them.
Riven instinctively leans into the qunari’s side, nestling into them, letting them serve as a pillar of strength. And then they are all the strength Riven has left.
Taash catches them, easily holding up the weight of the little elf.
“Y- you should go,” Riven manages, even as they savor the physical sensation of Taash’s furnace heat against their body.
Taash shakes their horned head, the veilcrystal catching like a matrix against the cool light of the fish tank; sending fractals scattering around the dimly lit space.
“Nope. Not gonna happen. You held me when Tama died.”
Closing their silver eyes, Riven leans harder into Taash, “This isn’t like that, Taash.”
“Same difference.”
Riven shakes their head, “No. I’m… I’ve always been this way. I’ve always been this messy, awful, maw of emotion and hurt. I’m broken, you shouldn’t waste your time on broken things. I have sharp edges, you’ll cut yourself.”
A long beat of silence passes between them. Then Taash is lifting Riven bodily into their lap, “No.”
Riven stares, feeling small, weak, pathetic as a newborn lamb.
Taash’s expression is stern, almost harsh as they chastise, “You are not broken .”
“Normal people-
“Fuck normal people.”
“Taash-
“I said no!”
Riven breaks into another volley of sobs, falling forward into Taash’s embrace. The qunari catches them, and they feel lips pressed to their temple.
“One time you told me you feel the same way I feel. Intense. This is part of that. But for you it's more. I always saw it. The same way you always saw me. You feel a lot more than most people.”
Riven clings to them, nods into their broad shoulder.
“I don’t know what you used to do to get through this but you’re not alone anymore.”
Alone . Maker preserve them, the ache, the burn, the absence of light and life in their chest. It had always been so fucking isolating. And here Taash is, radiant as the dawn, sparking a life in their cloven chest and offering them a hand to yank them from the maw of the abyss.
It is sadness. Madness. Mania and psychosis. Laughter like splinters in the dark. The jaws of mad dogs nipping at the heels.
“I love you,” Riven whispers, broken, harried by the blades of a thousand knives.
Because love, hope, joy, those precious, necessary things that Rook is bleeding in the absence of; Taash possesses them in bounds.
“I’ll carry you,” Taash says. “I won’t let go until you say.”
Riven clings tighter, pressing the whole of their small, lithe body into Taash’s stature. Taash sinks sideways on the chaise lounge, settling them longways.
“You’re not broken. You just feel a lot. Too much.”
“I can’t do it again, Taash,” Riven says. They remember the pain all too well; the instability, a top tipping on its side only to be spun up again, and again, and again. “I just want it to stop. I can hardly think. Everything hurts.”
Taash’s lips press to their temple again, and they hold the elf tighter. Riven can feel their voice rumbling through their chest as they speak, “I’m taking you to see a healer tomorrow. First thing. We can get ahead of this. Alright? You aren’t the darkness. You aren’t broken. You’re mine. And you’re not allowed to give up.”
“I love you,” Riven sobs again.
“I will carry you always.”
The blackest black seems a little less dark when tinged with Taash’s promise.
And, for all the love blooming in their chest, Riven realizes they aren’t so broken after all.