faderift | open | with the sound of my heart

He blinks, looking faintly surprised, but then huffs a breath that's part laugh.

"That's good," he says, "Because I'm not here for anything fun. I think I would have to creep away very disappointingly if you expected it."

That might not be true, but he's glad not to have to test it. He sets to work undressing her, his touch gentle and slow without being suggestive of anything more. He adds, with his eyes on the work and a faint hint of pleased color to his pale cheeks, "And I would love to stay. Thank you."

Athessa lets out a breath of relief she wasn't aware she was holding, but it takes only the imminent sense of expectation with it, not the other, more distant one. It's enough for her to focus on the present moment, though, and she does what she can to assist in Vanadi's gentle undressing. At a certain point she resigns herself simply to slipping her fingers into his hair in passing when he bends, touching the soft skin of his wrist or collarbone when convenient. They're not touches charged with sexual energy, but with a tactile need for contact, to ground herself or for balance.

Her limbs are colored with bruises at the joints, at her wrists and ankles in particular where the rope dug in, but there are faint dapples on her hips and elbows as well. The main event is her right shoulder, a stormy mottling of dark purples and reds, yellows and blues. To Athessa's eyes they're just varying shades of blue and brown and gray, and what she's able to see when she looks down at herself is only a fraction of the coloration on her back.

Vanadi takes careful stock of each bruise, brushing fingers feather-light over each one as it's counted. It slows the process not at all, merely incidental on-the-way brushes as his hands follow their paths. He isn't sure what it is they inspire in him. Anger, but is it still anger if it has nowhere to go? If the man responsible for it died screaming already? Whatever it is roiling in him, Vanadi soothes it with a refocus on Athessa, present and warm under his hands, and all he could ask for.

Eventually he's got each article of clothing neatly draped over the privacy screen, and he holds out both of his hands for Athessa's. She looks about ready to collapse, and if that is the case, he'd like to aim it at the bathtub.

She accepts his help getting into the tub and sinks down until the water is at chin level. The heat soothes some of the pains, but it's hardly an instantaneous thing. It takes time.

Time best spent in caring company. Athessa looks up at him and manages a smile.

"Are you gonna join me?"

She's caught him beginning to sink to a crouch beside the tub, and her invitation garners a blink — then a smile.

"Always, if you'll have me."

First, though, the bathwater. It's had a bit of time to cool while he filled it. He's absolutely not doing anything more with buckets, so he finishes his crouch and reaches a hand to the water, stirring it with a few fingers. It's a simple spell to heat the water, but slow-going. Still, the results will become slowly apparent, and he's satisfied.

He steps back to begin undressing, which goes significantly more quickly than it had for Athessa. His collection to show for the harrowing events of the night is primarily from the chains. They've left their mark in strangely-shaped bruises about his neck, ribs, arms, and legs, all looking perfectly ghastly on pale skin, and of course the stitched and wrapped dagger-hole of his forearm. He has the idea one shouldn't bathe with new stitches and wraps, but there are no doctors in the room to tell him no.

"We'll have to redress that after," Athessa says, nodding to his arm. She rests her chin on the edge of the tub and watches him undress, taking stock of his bruises much like he did hers, only from a slight remove.

"I'll keep it out of the water," he says, not terribly concerned about any of it. With his own clothing similarly hung neatly, he steps himself carefully into the unoccupied corner of the tub. His settle is slow as he eases into it, and he keeps his legs folded for the sake of space (and the bandaged arm rested along the rim), but eventually he leans into it with a relieved sigh.

Honestly, it's easy to forget how good a simple warm bath is.

It's universally accepted that the time during which the bathwater is hottest is for soaking, and washing up happens only towards the end of the bath once fingers get pruny and the temperature is low enough to no longer be soothing.

So it's expected, naturally, when Athessa shifts in the water, turning and stretching out her legs and laying against Vanadi's chest. It's a position that would be quite sexy, under other circumstances. One of her legs draped between his, her stomach and breasts pressed against his side and her face tucked in the crook of his neck. They've spent their fair share of time in this arrangement in her bed, but somehow with less exhaustion, less free-floating fear left over from a bygone threat.

He makes room for Athessa as soon as she's moving, unfolding folded legs, and welcomes her in with a one-armed drape of an embrace. Bodies, some part of his mind notes, always feel differently under the water as the brush against one another. The heat leaves them differently, the feel of the skin is foreign ... something like that.

Either way, he doesn't mind it in the slightest, and presses a kiss to the top of her head. His fingers drop into the water, at it again with the stirring and the warming. He would be hard-pressed to get this feeling anything like the hotsprings he'd known at home, but he can certainly try.

For a time, it's absolutely perfect. Comfortable. Calm. Safe.

But then Athessa's eyes start to close, lids heavy and every fiber of her being utterly exhausted. She was already sleep-deprived before everything at the Silver Lamp. And now, almost drifting off, she sees a flash of dead eyes again and she forces her eyes back open, blinking rapidly and breathing just a bit shallower.

It's not fair.

"Do elves bury their dead on Rune?" She whispers, when she thinks she'll be able to speak without sobbing. That familiar tightness in her throat makes it hard to speak, hard to keep her expression from flickering with the threat of tears, but she doesn't want to cry any more. Just furrowing her brow rekindles the headache from earlier, and she endures the pain of moving her arm to reach up and try and forcibly smooth it all away.

"Andrastians burn their dead," she goes on, "a-and Nevarrans mummify theirs. Invite spirits to use them as hosts."

Vanadi is in no danger of falling asleep. He never is, really. He's never needed much sleep to be functional, and it's been a long time since he was able to fall asleep in anyone else's presence regardless. So he's merely resting his eyes, tracking the rise and fall of Athessa's ribs against his side. The tiny flinch in her stands out like an alarm, and he can guess what it means. He recognizes it from many of his own nights.

"My city did," he says, quick with an answer regardless of the seeming randomness of the topic. His hand rises to stroke through her hair, and he hopes it's some kind of reassurance that she's not alone. "The drow elves, I think not." He considers this for a moment, and adds, "Do Nevarrans see many spirit-controlled mummies? That seems a bit grim."

"You'd have to ask a Nevarran," she says, staring past Vanadi's shoulder to the fireplace and watching the flames dance and sway. A wry look twists her mouth briefly. "More now than before, I bet."

Oh, but he wasn't here then, was he? Lifting a hand up through the water, she flattens her fingers out against his sternum, feeling his heart.

"Last year we spent Satinalia in Nevarra City because the Venatori had infiltrated the Mortalitasi, trying to get into the Necropolis. They infused the mummies with red lyrium and used them to overrun the city. And the dragon that attacked the city was mummified, too."

He quirks a brow at nothing in particular, and the fingers running through her hair keeps up for a few seconds as he considers that. Finally, "I followed very little of that. Satinalia, dragon, that was about the full of it. City, I suppose."

A soft huff, almost a laugh.

"The city fell to an army of walking dead, so they see more mummies up and about lately than before. A bad joke. I don't know how it normally works there."

"Ah."

That sounds... pretty intense? Pretty intense. Probably a bit more than a handful of elves falling prey to a terrible fate, though of course that one had been very, very personal.

"I can expect a lot of this sort of thing around here, then?"

"Mm."

Hard to say if that's agreement, or a weighing mm. This year in particular has been rough, at least for her. But last year wasn't so bad, leaving off the blood magic and the dead overtaking Nevarra City, and the spirit-induced nightmares in Firstfall.

"Only when there's a war on."

"Good to know," he murmurs, and resigns himself to it. If he still has the kind of lifespan he used to be able to expect, maybe he'll see his way out of war eventually. And until then, that appears to be life now.

He shifts under her, stirs a little more heat into the water, and says thoughtfully, "It's still worth it, easily. For the people I've met."

There are times late at night when Athessa feels particularly low and she wonders, would I give it up to go back to the way things were? Times when fighting in a war feels less worth it than otherwise. When she thinks, I used to be happy.

"I think so, too."

Of course it's all bullshit. She didn't used to be happy, she was on the run from herself and pretending everything was fine. And she wouldn't give up the people she's met, even with the promise of not knowing better. There'd be a disappointed version of her somewhere that knew who she gave up.

He lets that trail into a few long moments of silence, and listens to the crackle of the fire, the gentle lapping of water as he strokes Athessa's hair. It's peaceful, but sadness still hangs as thick as a woolen blanket around the tub, and he feel powerless to tear it down. Would anyone be able to? Maybe, but anyone isn't here. Just him.

"I want to know more about you, Athessa," he says quietly. "Is it a bad night for it?"

Ask me...when we can talk without acting like we're afraid to know each other, Derrica's voice echoes from many months ago, dredged up by Vanadi being so willing to ask to know more, to say the things he said.

Athessa considers saying yes, it is a bad night for it, but she can't bring herself to do it. She's not afraid of being known.

"What do you want to know?"

It's gracious of her; he'd not have begrudged a decline tonight.

"Everything," he says to the ceiling, where his eyes follow paths in the stonework. "Eventually. But I know that's a tall order. I would settle for ... for where you came from, and why you're here, and who has made you into the woman here before me."

"I was born about a day's ride from Kirkwall, where the Planasene Forest meets the Vimmark Mountains. My clan lived in an area they called Sulahn'an. It means land of song. Songs were how we passed down our history."

And as he's already guessed, she uses past tense when speaking of them.

"I still don't know what happened to them, not really. I was on a hunt when they disappeared."

Edited 2020-11-10 15:20 (UTC)

Oh. Disappeared. He winces. Is that better, he wonders, or worse than some bloody catastrophe? It's out of his depth to try and imagine it to judge, and so he only continues to stroke her hair.

"How many were they?" he asks, to wonder at logistics, and to wonder at the more personal angle, "And how old were you?"

"Twenty-five including myself. I was thirteen."

She frowns, briefly, trying to remember if she had already turned thirteen at the time, or if she was actually twelve and turned thirteen in Kirkwall. It doesn't really matter either way, she supposes.

"One of the hunters, Enallas, was teaching me how to track, but the storms had eroded the cliff face, made it unstable. He fell out of sight and I couldn't get to him, so I tried to find my way back on my own. By the time I got to camp, everyone was gone, only their stuff left behind," Some of which remained for years, as she discovered when she returned just last month.

"I waited under the aravel for three days, hoping they'd come back. When they didn't, I wandered out of the woods and onto the streets of Kirkwall."

His heart clenches at the thought of a child of thirteen, utterly alone, waiting for no one. It is worse than a bloody catastrophe, isn't it? He lets out a slow breath, and wonders if he has any right to ask more.

He does, though.

"Did you ever find out what happened to...?"

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squints at words i use too often

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