Work Text:
Rook’s seated at the edge of the chaise as he eases the door open, elbows on her knees and her shoulders curved inwards. Her head rests against laced fingers, turned away, towards the water. If she hears him come in, she gives no sign.
His legs won't move. Spite doesn't even bother waiting to argue it; he’s halfway across the space between them before the edges of his form have solidified, reaching for her with an outstretched hand that halts to hover just above her shoulder.
It would pass right through if he went any further, Lucanis knows. He imagines Spite knows, too. Maybe the thought of having to see it happen is enough to stay him; it rises like acid in Lucanis’ throat, just imagining it. He stays close though, rotating to the far side of the chaise and crouching beside her. His upturned, hawkish stare lines her silhouette in stark violet. Rook, he sighs, but it doesn’t feel like relief.
She doesn’t move. Lucanis will have to, against slow-rising dread that claws at his shoulders and tries to pull him back.
“I cannot believe we found you,” he says.
Finally, a hint of life, though barely. Rook turns her face down, forehead light against clasped hands. “I’m a little surprised, too, honestly,” she tells her knees.
"I thought I'd never see you again.”
Her hands fall away at that, coming to rest beside her legs. “Yeah, well, you know me. Obnoxiously persistent.”
Lucanis stops a few paces away. Spite’s eyes rise to meet his, even as Rook’s don't. Came back wrong, he says. Smells like the Fade. Like ink and sugar and sawdust. No more old blood but Rook still bleeds.
Not that Lucanis can see, but he’s learned, these last few months. There are other ways.
“Are you alright?” he asks, no matter how painfully, pathetically inadequate it is.
“I’m okay,” she says, too quietly. “Tired. I know the timekeeping’s not quite matching up, but by my count I’ve been awake for…two days? Two and a half? Not much by your standards, I guess. Nothing some sleep won’t fix.”
Lucanis isn’t so sure about that, but of every possible thing he could offer in response, of everything he’s imagined saying if he only had the chance, every confession and apology and plea half-formed in the endless stillness of the pantry these long weeks—of all of it, the last thing he wants is to argue.
Even in profile, she’s expressionless. The same careful, crafted blankness that had become painfully common again, before. There had been a time when he’d let himself think he’d learned how to ease that mask off, but it’d never been him. Not really. He’d convinced her to let him, for a time—that was all. Now, if he didn’t already know the way the bridge of her nose scrunches up when her smile is real, the wrinkles between her brows when she worries, the thin-lipped press of stifled anger, he might believe it. That she’s just overwhelmed. That she’s only tired.
He does know, though. He thinks he’ll always know.
Lucanis kneels before her, not touching. He doesn’t know what to say. Spite allows himself to fade from the overlapped space, the half-formed question lingering and aching.
“Did someone reach out to Evka?”
“We did.”
Rook draws in a very slow breath. “And his uncle?”
Emmrich had been the obvious choice, had offered, but it’d been Harding who went in the end. “Yes. He knows.”
“Good.” A fraction of a moment passes where her chin crumples, her lips tremble and then curl in on themselves. The next breath in is short and sharp, and then that little tremor is gone again, and so is she. She clears her throat. “Thank you.”
Lucanis has done nothing that deserves her thanks. That much is painfully clear. The silence of the room stretches long and heavy.
It’s Rook who breaks it, unexpectedly. “I thought you were dead, too,” she says, just short of toneless. Her fingers flex and release at her sides. “Solas showed me that. Your body. He showed me a lot of things. I’m glad at least that one wasn’t true.”
“I’m here,” he promises.
She nods, almost imperceptibly, but says nothing more.
“Rook,” he starts, but doesn’t quite know how to finish. “I—”
Loves her. That’s the rest—the part he can’t say and doesn’t know how to bury beneath other words any longer. He loves her, from the moment he opens his eyes until the moment he lets them close; in every red-washed, agonized minute she was gone; in the countless days and weeks and months that stretched before that; in the space between every heartbeat. He loves her and he felt as if he didn't breathe for a single one of those twenty-one days without her. He loves her and would have gone in her place. In Davrin’s. This would be easier for her if Davrin was here, he thinks. He’d make the trade without a moment’s hesitation.
He loves her. Against every imaginable odd, she’s here. Alive. A silent miracle.
And she won’t look at him.
Her hands rest on either side of her knees, gripping the edge of the cushion. He wants to cover them with his own. He doesn’t dare.
“I’m here,” Lucanis says again, barely above a whisper. Pleads.
She swallows so heavily that he can hear it in the hushed space, eyes still downturned. “I can’t do this with you right now,” she says. Her voice is all wrong.
Everything’s wrong. “I know things between us have been… different.”
“We’re fine.”
“Whatever changed,” he presses, his own hands flat along the outside of each of hers, barely a finger’s-width of space between his thumbs and her pinkies. It’d be the shift of a few inches at most to close the space, to rest his forehead against hers and know for sure that she’s real in his skin, in his bones. That she’s not one more dream he’s about to wake up from. “Whatever I’ve… you don’t need to do this alone.”
Salt, Spite murmurs, and not a breath later a drop of water lands on her leg, just above one knee—a small, dark, near-perfect circle on the fabric. Another follows just after. Lucanis’ hands itch to cup her face, to wipe the tears away with his thumbs before more can fall, to do anything. But Rook moves first, her own hands turning in to tuck beneath her thighs; those few inches between them stretch into a chasm.
“I have to walk out there in the morning,” Rook says, carefully. Her voice only catches once, just in the beginning, before she smooths it over into her usual, steady calm. “I have to look everyone in the eye and tell them we can do this.”
“You can. You—”
She keeps going as if he hadn’t spoken, finally raising her eyes to meet his. “If you ever cared for me even a little bit, even only as a friend, then please. Lucanis. I need you to go.”
It’s the if.
Do not go.
It’s the tears caught in the bottom curve of her eyes, refracted brilliant blue by the light. The way her entire body’s curled in on itself, away from his, as if even a brush against him might shatter her.
Lucanis—
“I am truly sorry,” he says. It takes every bit of effort to pull his hands away, to rock onto his heels and give her back the space he’d taken. Lucanis isn’t sure if it’s Spite or himeslf he needs to fight against, to force his body away from her, but he does it. For her, her manages. “For whatever it was. More than I can say. I’ll do anything you ask of me, including leave, if that’s really what you want. But what’s happened between us—if there’s a way for me to fix it…”
Rook’s eyes shift away from his, just enough to break the contact. Something flashes, swift and agonized across her face, before it vanishes. No further teardrops escape. “You didn’t do anything,” she murmurs in the general direction of his shoulder. She gives a small shake of her head, shifts her weight back just slightly. “Like I said. I’m just…I’m really tired. I need some sleep. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
It’s not unkind, her voice. No reprimand, no judgement, no anger. Lucanis finds himself suddenly wishing there was. He had thought to argue would be the last thing he would want, but he was wrong. This is worse.
You can’t, Spite insists, slightly desperate. Lucanis’ spine crawls with it, the need to reach for her, to pull the wall between them down stone by stone no matter how hard she fights him. To undo this, whatever it is.
They’ll look to her in the morning. Their friends. Their allies. They’ll hand her half-formed plans and broken hearts and all of their rage and expect her to hand back hope. A path forward, somehow.
And it’s Rook. Somehow, she will.
But not if he’s torn away the armor she needs to be able to do it.
No, Spite insists, the rage rising, but Lucanis can handle that.
“Whatever you need from me, it’s yours.” Even this.
A part of him thought he could be her shield, once. The bulwark against the world that would let her guard lower, just a little. That’s not the way forward, for them—he can see that now.
If he can’t be that for her, he can at least protect the one she’s made for herself.
No! We won’t! No, nonoNO.
Lucanis shifts his weight to the balls of his feet and stands. “Always,” he swears. She doesn’t need to believe it for it to be true.
“Thanks.” Rook shifts her weight to turn in her seat, face washed out pale in the shifting light off the water as she faces it. “Get some rest yourself, okay? You look tired, too.”
She doesn't look as he goes—doesn’t glance over her shoulder when he opens the door, doesn’t make a sound as he pulls it quietly closed again. As he leaves her.
When morning comes—and it does, despite the unchanging red sky, the interminable, silent hours he spends awake on his cot staring at the ceiling—they gather. Rook doesn’t look at the spaces Davrin and Bellara should be, but she does look at the map they’ve stretched out for her, the markers they hand her in hopes of an answer. Steady, solid, brilliant Rook, who takes a breath, and rests her hands on her hips, and finds them a future.
And she does look them in the eye as she spreads the world’s last desperate hopes across the table. Every one of them—even him.
“We can do this,” she says, with force that makes it fact.
And even now, here, on this far side of the chasm that’s spread too wide to cross, it’s not too far to see. There she is.