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Davrin sometimes felt his companions got more excited to see Assan than to see him-- which is fine, really. As the vaunted protector turned parental guardian turned outright parent of the last known (free, at present) griffon in the world, he’d long come to terms with the idea of Assan’s life having more inherent… not worth, maybe, but importance? Prestige, of a sort? Than his own. He is, after all, a warden, and what were wardens if not the sacrificial lamb which fueled the shield against the dark.
Lambs with sharp teeth, maybe. But still a sacrificial lamb.
He’d somewhat reluctantly allowed Assan to join Taash and Bellara on a short excursion to Arlathan, to help them reach some high-up places as they searched for some relic or another to maybe help them in their fight against the Evanuris. It was always artifacts and Evanuris, these days; Davrin not-so-secretly missed when it was just cold Weisshaupt stone and dry Frostback Mountain air-- tactile, familiar things. When the monsters were understandable and he could stab them and things could be done, finished, complete.
He’s weary, he realizes, as he summits the stairs leading up to his quarters, such as they are; it’s been a long few days-- a long life , really, even as short as his is going to be-- of darting through eluvians and fighting various cults, which never seem to get any smaller no matter how many bodies Davrin and his allies put in the ground, and he wants nothing more than to sit by the fire with his carving knife and finish putting the details on the Emissary figurine he’s working on.
The door creaks open, and he’s met with the familiar view of the Fade swirling beyond the stone of the Lighthouse in all its muted glory. There’s no real wind, here, but sometimes he swears he can feel it, brushing against his face with the smell of loamy soil and the creak of familiar trees. He closes his eyes and breathes it in.
When he opens them again, he stops in his tracks.
“Rook?”
Leo stands in front of the fire, facing the blazing hearth. His pale skin is draped in some sort of green fabric, soft flecks of gold damask blinking in the firelight. His shoulders are bare, dotted with freckles that spread like starbursts over the curve of his shoulderblades. He doesn’t turn around.
“Davrin.” Leo stretches his vowels just a half-second longer, voice lilting up, like a taunt, a tease.
Davrin feels a familiar spike in his blood pressure. “What are you doing here?”
“Hunting,” Leo says, and Davrin fights down a growl. The erstwhile leader of their little brigade makes a habit of getting under his skin, like he was born to it. By now, their dance is a familiar one: a slow, twisting orbit of euphemism and suggestion, a skirting hand, a light touch. And Davrin’s not an idiot. He knows what Leo’s offering. He’s not a sentimental fool, either, thinking it all needs to be perfect. He’s a Grey Warden, after all, and he’s spent a good part of his life cloistered with a veritable army of people with shortened lifespans and questionable tastes.
But that’s important, isn’t it? The lifespan thing. Even if he doesn’t want it to be. He only has fifteen, maybe twenty years left to live. At some point, it has to matter. At some point it should matter.
Davrin blinks, bone-tired. He doesn’t think he really has it in him for a go-round, today. He opens his mouth to say so when Leo interrupts:
“See, I may not be a very experienced hunter, but I have it on good authority that to get what you want, you need the right bait.” Leo shifts, and the green silk around him slips lower, betraying the furrow of his spinal column. “I’ve been after this particular quarry for a while now, and I’ve gotten close, but not close enough. And I thought for a while I was being too aggressive, and scaring them off, but now I think I know better--,”
“You do, huh?”
“--and I’m not being aggressive enough.”
Leo rolls his shoulders back and the fabric falls. He’s not wearing anything underneath. Backlit by the hearth, he glows like a private sun, flame-red hair made even brighter. Davrin’s mouth goes dry.
“What do you think, monster hunter?” Leo’s spine flexes, shifting under his skin. He slowly reaches up to undo the tie in his hair, a cascade of fire down across the span of his back. “Good enough to catch a warden?”
And there’s a million reasons why it shouldn’t be-- there’s a million reasons they shouldn’t be-- but Davrin's stepping forward and knocking his chair out of the way with the line of his thigh and it’s some magic spell, it has to be, some pure, animal magnetism that has him reaching for Leo’s hips (freckles, so many freckles!) and centering the knobs of them in his palms and oh Mythal’enaste his fingertips almost touch around Leo's waist and he is suddenly nigh-consumed with the need to know if he is fire-red everywhere.
Leo’s soft, snickering laugh heats Davrin more, but not in his usual way; his voice lacks the normal sneer as he quietly asks, “Guess that’s a yes?”
“Shut up.” But Davrin can’t bring himself to really be angry about it, because he walked into the trap, didn’t he? As it is, his thumbs are rubbing circles on the small of Leo’s back and he’s all but bent his nose to his hair.
“Come on, Davrin,” Leo whispers, shifting back on his heels and pressing the seam of his naked body to the front of Davrin’s clothed one, “take the bait.”
“Shouldn’t,” Davrin growls, and with Leo warm against him, head leaned back against his collarbones so Davrin can look down over the curves of his chest, the softness of his abdomen, the lick of fire between his legs, he’s amazed he managed to get out a coherent thought.
“Why?” Leo asks, voice hitched in a way that could be equally poorly-constrained passion, but could also be fear. Davrin thinks of himself being the cause of that fear and his heart squeezes.
“It won’t end well.” It can’t.
“You don’t know that.” Leo cranes his neck to nose against the pulse in Davrin’s throat, smears gold glitter from his eye-shadow across Davrin’s skin, and he feels like he’s been chosen, baptized. He has flashing memories of black blood in a chalice, the thrum of it matching the present pulse in his ears. “But you should know this: I get what I want, Davrin. And I want you.”
It shouldn’t move him to the precipice-- he should be stronger than to be swayed by simple words-- but something about Rook, about Leo, and his dashing, roguish ways, his tongue in cheek banter, his flexibility in the face of certain doom, suddenly standing in one place and refusing to be moved, refusing to give on the subject of what he wants, that pulls Davrin in, and he’s burying his nose in Leo’s hair and inhaling. He smells like salt and sun and the sea, and as Davrin kisses down the side of his face, teeth to his ear, Leo somehow tastes like warmth and fire and, impossibly, light-- although it might be the glitter in his makeup, maybe-- and Leo’s breath is hitching in his chest and he’s curving around and cupping Davrin’s cheek and pressing their mouths together.
It’s like a dam breaks in his chest and all at once, Davrin wants . He wants with a fury and a passion that surprises him, but probably shouldn’t, given how furious and passionate he does most everything in his life-- protecting the griffons, being a warden-- and he licks into Leo’s mouth and drinks in his soft whines. One hand almost eclipses Leo’s pale face while the other drifts low over his abdomen, palming the soft skin, fingers sliding through the hair between his legs, pressing Leo back against him as he drives his own hips forward in an insistent press.
Davrin’s hand curls lower, two fingers spreading Leo’s cunt, and the dampness makes him growl into Leo’s mouth; Leo has the gall to laugh, self-satisfied, and something in Davrin snaps. He wraps his hand around the inside of Leo’s thigh and hikes him up and forward, bracing one leg beneath him and lifting him off the ground. Leo throws out a hand to catch on the mantle of the fireplace as Davrin bares down on him, bending him forward, forehead to stone, centering Leo’s cock between his first two fingers and sliding against it in short, teasing jerks. Leo strangles out a gasp into the heat from the fire and squirms, pushing back against the line of Davrin’s body, the bulge in his pants.
Shifting his hand, Davrin slips one finger into Leo’s cunt, tracing light circles around his cock with his thumb. Leo’s thighs flex and try to close, but Davrin keeps them braced open around his thigh, one broad hand holding Leo up by his chest, crux of thumb and forefinger sliding ever closer to Leo’s throat. Davrin’s manhandling him like a doll, like one of his carved figurines, and Leo is dripping, hips jerking with no rhyme or reason to try and press down against Davrin’s hand, to get more pressure on his cock, but he can’t catch, can’t get his balance without falling to one side. Davrin wouldn’t let him fall into the fire but the threat is still there, and Leo lifts his head and drags his nose across the stone and moans. He finally gets one of his arms free of Davrin’s hold and presses against the fireplace mantle, fighting for some semblance of control, but Davrin pulls him closer and slips another into him, scissoring him open and applying dull pressure to his cock with the heel of his hand.
Hips moving in jerking circles, Leo frees his other arm, pushing on the fireplace to drive himself back into Davrin more, drive himself harder on Davrin’s fingers, to try and get back some semblance of control; Davrin wraps his forearm across Leo’s chest and lifts him, biting the crux of his neck and shoulder and stuffing a third finger into him. Leo throws his head back and shouts as he comes, thighs snapping closed over Davrin’s hand, fingers flexing, empty in the air.
“That what you wanted?” Davrin asks, and he almost doesn’t recognize the sound of his own voice, hoarse and deep and slightly unhinged, sounding monstrous in his own ears. He deposits Leo in his carving chair just short of roughly, the roar of the fire and the blood in his head almost drowning out Leo’s panting. For the briefest of moments, Davrin’s worried he went too far, that all the pushing and the pulling and the deep, bruising ring of teeth on Leo’s pale shoulder were too much, but then Leo finds his balance, hands on the back of the chair, back arched, wet cunt on full display.
“Come on, warden,” he says, somehow managing to sound snide even when his voice is raspy with use, “you can do better than that.”
Davrin sees red, and he isn’t sure if the hair splayed over Leo’s shoulders or the curls matted to his cunt, but he’s undoing his pants with one hand and gripping Leo’s hip hard enough to bruise, pulling him back and sliding his cock through Leo’s slick folds. He drags hard against Leo’s clit, making him gasp, thighs jumping as he twitches with oversensitivity. Leo’s knees try to close and Davrin grips him by the front of his thigh and pulls him back open for another slow, insistent grind.
Leo braces his hands on the back of Davrin’s chair even as the breath catches in his throat, voice thick. “Fuck me like you mean it, Davrin.”
Davrin doesn’t recognize the growl that comes out of him. His hips stutter back and he pulls Leo harder, pulling him wider, like he could pull him apart and slide into the spaces between; the head of his cock catches on Leo’s cunt and he sinks home, Leo’s head throwing back with a shout, somehow still too tight to take all of Davrin at once. Davrin exhales and leans over Leo’s back, pressing a kiss to the knobs of his spine, hips rabbiting back and forth to sink deeper and deeper with each twitch, relishing in Leo’s quiet, hurried mutters of yes, yes, yes.
Draped over Leo arched in the chair, Davrin slides one hand around to his front to thumb at Leo’s cock, feeling the squeezing pulse of Leo’s cunt around him as his thighs clench and shake. Davrin’s teeth close around the lobe of Leo’s ear, nipping, and Leo shudders, using his arms to rock back, and back, and back, until finally, finally Davrin is fully seated within him.
Davrin jerks Leo’s poor, overstimulated cock with a light touch, voice soft in his ear: “Theeeere you go. Good boy.”
Leo whines, whole body shuddering. “Fuck yo--,”
All at once, Davrin pulls out and thrusts forward, hips to the curve of his ass with a hard slap, and Leo yells. Davrin chuckles in his ear, and the ensuing snark is drowned under the brutal pace Davrin sets. Leo can do little but hold the back of the chair and gasp. Davrin splays a hand over Leo’s lower belly and pulls them closer together, moaning into the back of Leo’s neck, tongue laving the trail of freckles serpentining over his spine.
Leo drops a hand to rest over Davrin’s, fingers laying in the spaces between. “Fuck,” he hisses, tongue lolled, saliva dripping. “ Fuck , Davrin--,”
Davrin thumbs over his cock, pelvis tilting slightly to hit the spot inside of Leo that makes him the most vocal (an easy thing to do, considering he is always vocal) and Leo tightens around Davrin, spine dropping, shoulders going taut. He comes on a moan interspersed with a sob as Davrin keeps the pressure on his little cock, pulsing it against his fingers with the force of his thrusts. Leo’s cheek is pressed to the back of the chair, and he’s drooling, and his knees are trying to close but they can’t. “Dav-- Davrin, I-- please--,” and he doesn’t even know what he’s begging for, but Davrin’s teeth are on his neck again, and his arm is wrapped around him, pulling Leo onto his cock even as he’s thrusting up into him.
“This is what you wanted, Laidir,” Davrin growls, abdomen tight, threads of something dark and beautiful streaming through his veins, “so take it.”
“Yes, yes, yes--,” Leo’s voice breaks and his nails dig into the back of the chair, head lolled back as Davrin bites his throat, and the taste of Leo’s skin is fuzzy on his tongue as Davrin pulls him down as far as he’ll go and the storm building within him breaks with the barrier of Leo’s flesh in his teeth.
Davrin’s breath is hot and wet, nose seamed into the crook of Leo’s jaw, eyes half lidded as the buzz in his veins fades and he comes back to himself. There is iron on his tongue. Leo’s collapsed against the back of the chair, cheek squished by the moulding, and Davrin can see the curve of his cheeks were his mouth is pulled into a smile. One broad hand absently pets a reddened hip, soothing over bruises in the shape of his own grip, as they individualize again, so crushed into each other it’s hard to remember where one ends and the next begins.
Davrin sits back, first, overwarm; the shift of him causes Leo’s cunt to clench down and he groans, deciding standing all the way up is too much effort, and rests his forehead against the span of Leo’s back. The inside of Leo’s thigh rests against the top of his own, where is knee is bent to the chair, and he can feel it trembling.
“Just… let me know when you’re ready to stand up,” Davrin says, somewhat disappointed in how tired he sounds, though it is quickly forgotten when Leo snickers.
“Yeah, try never.” Leo’s voice catches and he clears his throat, spine flexing, cunt giving another weak pulse around Davrin’s dick. “That was fantastic.”
Davrin doesn’t want to bask in the praise, but he can’t stop himself, can’t stop the betraying thing which blooms within him at the poorly-contained joy in Leo’s voice. “Yeah?” he asks, though he hates himself for it, a little. “Worth the wait?”
“Gods above, yes. Gods.”
Davrin feels strong enough to sit up, now. He catches a red mark smeared over the side of Leo’s throat, like some mockery of a lipstick mark. Something curls within him, a double-edged weapon, one side the sharp pride of seeing Leo marked by his teeth, the other an unfamiliar, cold fear. His brain must be thoroughly fucked out because he sounds awful quiet when he says, “I made you bleed.”
Leo does not sound perturbed. “I thought you might have.” He reaches up and splays long, narrow fingers over the breaks in his skin in the shape of Davrin’s teeth. “That was when you came, yeah? Felt really good.” His voice is a little high, a little giddy. It makes Davrin feel better, which, in turn, makes him more nervous.
Leo makes him feel better. Leo makes him feel good. Leo makes him happy.
Davrin doesn’t know if he’s meant to be happy.
Leo seemingly doesn’t notice his sudden stillness-- or if he does, he chooses not to comment. “Carry me to the bed, my legs are still shaking.”
Davrin, belatedly, realizes he’s still inside of Leo. He slides out, and they both groan. He sits back and looks down and sees his own come staining the inside of Leo’s thighs, and the damp mess between them. “Oh, you’re inviting yourself into my bed, now?” he asks, as he tucks himself away.
“Well, I’m hardly about to walk out of here like this, am I?”
Davrin wants to protest. Really, he wants to think that bringing Rook to his bed is… crossing some line. Breaking down some wall that’s structurally important and load-bearing. But given that he was just inside the man, it all seems a bit silly, so he stands back and-- after ascertaining that his own gently-shaking legs can hold both himself and another person-- scoops Leo into his arms.
Leo curls into him like he was meant to be there, cheek against Davrin’s collarbone, throat marked with imprints of Davrin’s teeth.
“Do you think we have time for a nap?” he asks, quietly, as Davrin crosses the floor to the tucked-away alcove where his bed is.
Davrin is, somehow, still hesitant. Everything is starting to feel a little too right, and it’s putting his back up in ways he really does not have the brainpower to consider, right now.
So he says, “The world won’t save itself,” and tries to pretend he isn’t devastated when Leo’s smile falls. Davrin deposits him gently on the bed and stands up, hands to his hips, fighting the strange anxiety building in his chest. “You can take a nap,” he finally allows, trying to find some middle ground that will make them both… not happy, but not unhappy, either. “I’m going to… check on Assan.” Yes, because that’s his job. Protecting Assan. Saving the griffons.
Not fucking Rook. Not falling for his boss. Not taking naps and being soft and feeling safe. Loved.
Leo looks away.
“Yeah, I’ll just. Take a breather, I guess.”
And it all feels so… anticlimactic. After what they just did. After what they’ve done. Davrin can’t afford to be sidetracked. Can’t afford to be distracted. He really should shut this down, hard, and now. They had their fun, had their little romp, but it was time to get back on track.
He opens his mouth to say so. To shut this door firmly. To sever it, wholly and completely.
But the sting of fear that threads up through him like a monster’s claw makes the breath catch in his throat, and he can’t. He should, he has to, but he can’t.
He bends forward, instead, and presses his lips to the center of Leoron’s vallaslin, to the raven etched in deep green between his brows-- Dirthamen, keeper of secrets. Here is a secret for you to keep-- palm of his hand squeezing over the bruises on Leo’s shoulder.
Davrin stands. “I’ll see you at dinner, yeah?”
Leo smiles-- just a little. Just enough. Davrin’s heart sings. Davrin’s heart hurts. “Yeah. See you.”
On his way out, the wind from the Fade smells like the sea, and Davrin’s skin feels warmed by the light of the sun.