I had the pleasure of writing about Darva Lavellan and Dorian for @goblin-deity - thank you for trusting me with such a moving moment in their lives, friend!
My Ko-Fi || My Commissions (Slots currently CLOSED as of 8/7/19 - but check out my giveaway!)
Pairing: Darva Lavellan x Dorian Pavus
Rating: Teen for mature themes. Trigger warning for terminal illness similar to cancer, and death of a parent.
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If Darva Lavellan had been feeling poorly lately, that was to be expected. Weight of the world on his shoulders and magic hand eating him up, and all that. Who wouldn’t be feeling a little poorly? Plus there were the nonstop treks back and forth and back and forth across Thedas. That was the only reason he was feeling unwell.
It was only when the ache set well and truly into his bones - when all of his joints hurt - when he felt the swelling at the points of his jaw, that tender spot, the gland that the clan’s healers said had to do with your body’s ability to fight infection - that he knew it was something more.
It was then that he thought at once of his father. Ahgie Lavellan. His safe haven throughout all his childhood. The parent he could trust and turn to, who did not wear his fear like a badge on his sleeve the way his mother did. Ahgie Lavellan, strong and brave, who died at the hands of an Orlesian hunting party when Darva was fourteen. Ahgie Lavellan who, before that, did not fear the blades of vengeful humans, but instead the sickness growing in his own bones.
“You’re going to stop being sick though, right? Someday?” Darva had asked him when his father told him why he was tired, why he was in pain, why he had to keep going to the healers.
“I will,” Ahgie said. “But I don’t think it will be because I get better, da’mynatha’la. I think it will be the opposite.”
Darva still felt a shiver of sadness, an ache, whenever he thought of his father’s nickname for him. My little moon.
He’d died only a few months later. The sickness never got the chance to eat him up. But now, sixteen years later, looking in the mirror and seeing a face that looked more and more like his father’s every day, Darva knew what was wrong.
He went to the healers to confirm it. A wasting illness, one that crept into your blood and your bones, resulted in hard knobs of swollen tissue within your body. A death sentence.
“I need your utmost discretion with this,” he told them at once.
His mind was already thinking of the currency he dealt in frequently now: secrets. Of how the Inquisition’s enemies would react if they knew. The Inquisitor was not only a Dalish elf whose greatest qualification for his office was a magic glowing hand, whose greatest protection was a pair of daggers that he wielded with particular style and lethality, but a man whose own body was in revolt, who was dying?
“Of course, Inquisitor.”
He would tell Leliana to monitor the correspondence of the healers nonetheless - without telling her why. She might start to work out her own reasons, but he trusted her entirely. Whatever she did work out, she would keep to herself.
He felt oddly calm about it all. So he was sick. There was also an ancient would-be god who had it out for him, so in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t that big of a deal. He just had to stay well long enough to fix this mess. Then he could fall apart. Hadn’t that been the plan all along? Hadn’t he been running from one disaster to another ever since he took his vallaslin and left his clan? This was just the next disaster. Nice to have a bit of a head’s up, really.
He’d keep it secret until absolutely necessary to do otherwise. That was the logical, responsible thing to do. Pretend it wasn’t happening.
He’d almost convinced himself of that until he was standing in the great hall of Skyhold, and he saw Dorian across the way. He was just leaving the rotunda, Vivienne at his side. The two of them were talking animatedly. Dorian was gesturing wildly with his hands, as he was wont to do when he got worked up about something. Darva froze, sticking close to the shadows of the door he had just exited, watching the two of them go. Watching Dorian go. His broad shoulders and his sharp, handsome face. Darva’s heart beat faster at the sight of that man - every single time - and things were serious between them now.
And just like that, the illness - this next disaster - was suddenly, vastly, unfair.
He’d come all this way - endured all of the shit life had thrown at him - nearly drowning in that river when he was young, his mother’s controlling paranoia, losing his father, his mother’s anger and grief then, how they were directed at him - drifting from place to place, finally returning home, only to leave for the Conclave and land in this nightmare - he’d endured all of that, found a man who shone a bright light into every one of those dark corners - was just starting to imagine a world where he could be happy, could have a home -
And now this.
Fuck.
He let Dorian and Vivienne leave the great hall without calling out to them. He stayed there in the shadows, so full of anger, of fear, that he could not move.
Darva went up to his quarters after that. He even had them bring his dinner up to him. He picked at it for a while. Then he laid out his collection of daggers and began polishing and inspecting them. It was good to do that. It was something small that he could control. And besides - they were bright, dangerous and strong. Qualities he would need in the time to come.
Dorian didn’t come looking for him, which was unusual, but his lover also knew that Darva was a man who occasionally needed his space. Who had been a solitary, watchful child, living isolated in a world-within-a-world, for many years. Darva missed him immediately, and soon that feeling bled over into a kind of self-pity that pinned him to the bed.
It wasn’t fair. His own body risen up in revolt against him, at a time when everyone needed and needed and needed things from him - expected and expected and expected things - when he was already barely qualified as it was -
How had his father done it? A hunter, a family man, a husband - how had he still gotten up every day and smiled, gone about what he needed to do? He could never ask him, could he? Like so many other things, he was going to have to figure this one out alone.
Or maybe it wouldn’t be alone. There was Dorian. Dorian with his agile mind, his voracious appetite for reading, his kindness. His knowledge of what it was like to live a life alone, a life apart. Dorian understood him in a way no one else did. He could rely on Dorian.
Then, tossing and turning in his bed, he thought of his mother. She had not been an asset to her husband or her son, in the end. Not with the way fear and grief twisted her up inside, as real and as violent as any illness. Not with the way they came spilling out of her mouth in accusation after accusation. Dorian was not like that. But there was no denying that there was a burden here. Something Darva himself could bear. He was sure of that. So that was his final decision, late that night. That he would bear this alone in the deep darkness of his mind, in the deep darkness of each night to come - however many of those he had left.
*
They were preparing to head out to Crestwood soon. There was that absolutely lovely, charming lake full of undead that needed dealing with, and then there would be a holiday in a lovely nearby castle that was also overrun with bandits.
“Seeing as how we are about to enjoy such luxuries,” Dorian said to him that next day. “How about we slum it for a bit? Spend some time just the two of us really roughing it, so we can properly appreciate the weeks to come.”
Darva was already smiling, already opening up from the inside out - a sweet feeling, a rush like when you knew you had the perfect hand of cards in Wicked Grace.
“Would a private dinner in one of the spare rooms suit your definition of roughing it? Perhaps some candles and wine to really seal the deal?”
Dorian sauntered closer, leaning against the wall, smiling, his chin tilted up. All confidence and ease and sultry enough to grab anyone’s attention.
“Dinner in a drafty tower with terrible company? My, my, Inquisitor. You do know how to spoil a man.”
Darva wanted to kiss him right then. But he just mirrored his posture instead.
“Well, tonight isn’t about spoiling anyone, is it? It’s about roughing it. Or have you lost track of your own joke?”
“I never lose track of anything that matters.”
It was true. Dorian played the dilettante but he had the focus of a bloodhound, a mind to exceed any of the scholars in the Inquisition’s employ. How Darva had ever caught his eye - had ever held it - was sometimes beyond him.
Dorian would turn that focus to his illness, if Darva let him in. The sickness would consume Darva’s body but it would consume Dorian’s mind. He was more sure than ever of the decision he’d made not to tell him.
“Darva?”
Dorian’s tone had shifted and so had his posture. Gone was the flirtatious smile, the cocked hip, the raised chin. Shit.
“My apologies. Just trying to dream up a menu that will suit your very particular tastes, Serah Pavus.” Darva took Dorian’s hand, raised it to his lips, brushed a kiss across the knuckles. Light and polite and perfect as you please, just the way Josephine had taught him.
“I see. I expect to be impressed then, amatus.”
Amatus.
That word sat heavy and new on Darva’s mind the rest of that day. Beloved. It was a word full of promise and meaning and if Darva had had doubts about living up to it before - and he had - they were doubled now. Whether he died at the hands of one of the Venatori or some goddamn dragon or Corypheus himself or because of his own failing body, he was going to die. Sooner than he should.
So maybe he ought to tell Dorian - let him get out now, before that word amatus acquired more and more and more meaning, more memories.
But Darva still went to the kitchens and asked for roast duck in a pan sauce, figs, their best red wine, fresh bread, and baked vegetables. Because his mind inevitably circled back to all the things about Dorian that he could not bear to lose - his biting humor, yes, his wit, his charm - but also the things that lay beneath all of that. The bruises they shared in common. The loneliness - the disappointed parents - the years of not fitting in, and the armor they’d built up to resist that. And the tenderness that they had now, finally, found with one another.
He couldn’t lose that. Not now. He was selfish that way.
Dorian met him in one of the spare rooms they’d redone to house visiting dignitaries. It had rich green curtains that Darva himself had chosen out of an array of swatches that Josephine presented him with. They were shot through with gold thread, and it made him think of the light on the trees in the forests where he’d grown up. All of the furniture in the room was made of a highly polished red wood that he couldn’t recall the name of now - something imported all the way from Seheron, if he remembered right. The sort of thing he might once have seen getting unloaded off of a pirate ship in Llomeryn.
The candles he’d chosen were simple, unscented. He knew Dorian would likely have chosen his own scent to wear at the pulsepoint of his neck and on each of his wrists, and he wanted to be able to smell that instead. To drink in every aspect of his lover. All joking aside, he might have almost preferred that they didn’t meet in such a rareified space, with its tapestries and stained glass window and fine furniture. The better to focus entirely on one another. It was the longing for a simpler life that had drawn Darva back to his clan, after all - and without that longing he would never have ended up at the Conclave. Would never have ended up here.
“Does this suit your tastes?” he asked Dorian with a sweeping gesture of his arm as he welcomed him in. Dorian tapped a finger against his chin, as if truly considering.
“Passable enough, I suppose. For the South. And anything is better than the muck you’re dragging me too.”
“Well, it isn’t the Fallow Mire this time.”
“You mean to tell me that Ferelden isn’t comprised entirely of muck? What a fascinating theory.”
Darva laughed. He hadn’t laughed since he got the news, he realized abruptly, and that meant he was laughing a little harder than he should have been, as if his body was giddy at the sudden release. It was like what used to happen when he would escape out from under his mother’s thumb and go to see his friends, how the first laugh that burst out of him would be too loud, too nervous. Too relieved.
Dorian had noticed, of course. His gold-brown eyes were narrowed slightly. But he was quick to smile.
“I am pleased I can be such a source of amusement for you. Shall we sit?”
Dorian continued to do his best to be a source of amusement as they ate the roasted duck and vegetables (which he pronounced passable as well) and the figs (which he couldn’t even make jokes about, being too busy actually moaning over how sweet they were). His hand was also never far from Darva. Sometimes it was on his knee beneath the table, sometimes on his wrist. Sometimes he traced idle patterns on the back of Darva’s hand, or on the palm. Sometimes he just laced their fingertips. When the food was gone, Dorian did that one more time.
“Hello,” he said, quietly, and just like that, Darva landed fully in the moment. There was no banter, no thought for past or future. Just the two of them, sitting in the candlelight, bodies warm with wine, palms touching. Darva tugged Dorian’s hand closer and kissed the back of it.
“Hello.”
“How have you been?” Dorian went on. This was how it was with them. Dancing for a while, working past the layers of scars, until they were vulnerable to one another. Until they could really talk.
But Darva couldn’t really talk about the thing most on his mind, could he? The fact that he ached all over, that he was exhausted. That it would only get worse from here, and there was no telling how fast or how slow that would happen. His father had known about his own illness for a good six months before it became noticeably worse, and even then the healers thought he might have another year left from that point.
“Same old,” Darva said. “Weight of the world and all that. Must be the middle of the week.”
The answer was too flippant. Dorian recognized the tone for what it was. A defense. A scar.
“I know that there is only so much I can do about that weight - but you know that I will take any part of it I can from you, right?”
There was a lump in Darva’s throat that he desperately wished would vanish. It was a childish lump. A needy one. Not the reaction of a grown man in charge of one of the largest military forces in Thedas, who had a magic in his hand that could heal the sky.
“I do. Maybe you should just buy me a new dagger instead. I’d love one with a handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl, you know.”
His own instinctive sarcasm betrayed him again. Dorian only looked more concerned.
“A dagger. Yes. If that’s what you need from me.”
Shit.
Darva held out his other hand - the marked one - for Dorian’s. Dorian accepted the gesture, brow still furrowed.
“I’m being an idiot. I’m sorry for that. I do need more from you than that. I’m just - not good at asking. And I have my own things to work through a bit, first.”
“You have seemed off today. Is that why?”
It was strange, being that seen. Being that known. Darva had passed most of his adult life drifting, never staying long enough to be really seen. Really known. And here Dorian was, not just aware of his subtle shifts in mood, but concerned for them.
“Yes. But I don’t want to burden you with it.”
“It’s not a burden if I’m asking, amatus.”
Darva had a dozen witty retorts, and two dozen more that weren’t quite as witty, but his mind circled back to a single thought over and over again. It is. You just don’t know it yet. And then he was imagining actually speaking the words out loud: I am sick. Wasting away from the inside out. I’m going to die. He imagined how Dorian’s face would change when he heard the news. How everything would change. And he hated the idea so violently that he wanted to stand and leave the room, leave the castle, slip out of his skin and into someone else’s entirely. It was all so terribly unfair - pinned between illness and death and Dorian, and all that their love promised.
“Like I said,” he went on finally. “I’m being an idiot. Can you give me another day or two to be an idiot about this?”
“Of course.”
Darva let go of Dorian’s hands then, but only so he could stand up from the table, walk around to the other side, take his lover’s face in both his hands, and bend down and kiss him on the lips. He felt Dorian’s gentle intake of breath ghost across his cheek - felt him part his lips in reply, welcoming Darva in - and everything was softness, connection, warmth from there. They cleared up from their dinner and walked around the battlements, hand in hand in the moonlight, not speaking anymore, just feeling.
Darva came to a different realization late that night. The way he felt about Dorian - the way he lay there, picturing his face, hearing his laugh, turning the images of his lover over and over and over in his mind - he had not felt this way about anyone ever before. It was different even than the way he’d felt about Sorrel, his first love - or about Livonah before that. And that meant he could not behave the way he had before. He couldn’t evade, hide, conceal. He had to be forthright. Honest.
He had to tell him that he was dying. Dorian would do with that information what he would. Darva had to show him the respect he deserved - had to give him that chance to decide what to do.
This realization was a more difficult one. It sat higher in his throat - choked off his breath, made it harder to breathe. But he knew it was the right one.
*
They set out the next morning for Crestwood, all thrilled to bits at the idea of the undead they’d be fighting, all joking loudly about it - with the exception of Cassandra of course, who simply let out one of her long-suffering sighs and rode on ahead to keep a lookout. Sera eventually joined her, declaring that she didn’t want to be stuck with the schmoopy-eyed lovebirds. With the two of them gone, Darva found himself fidgeting - tugging at loose threads on his saddle, fussing with his hair, trying to make sure all the dark curls were tucked away, disturbing some of them with his fussing, putting them back again. It didn’t take long for Dorian to start staring.
“Having another case of your wiggles, over there?” he asked, smiling. Darva felt heat rise into his face.
“I don’t have wiggles.” This was an opportunity, though - to speak about the root of his unease. Cassandra and Sera were far enough ahead after all. Courage, Darva. He cleared his throat. “I am, however, feeling rather fidgety. I - I do have something to tell you.”
Dorian nudged his horse closer. His brown eyes were already full of concern, dark-eyebrows knitted together with it.
“Tell me, then.”
There was nothing to do but jump.
“I’ve been feeling poorly. More poorly than usual. I went to the healers earlier this week and they confirmed it for me. I’m sick. The way my father was before he died.”
The words felt surreal in the midmorning light. Even this high in the mountains there was so much life - the evergreens were a vibrant emerald against the slate-colored slopes. Cardinals dove in and out of them, slashes of brilliant crimson against the white snow. Further still you could see down into Ferelden, its myriad shades of green, brown, and gold. And here Darva was talking about death - thinking about his own death, about how he felt pretty good today, all things considered. There wasn’t that swollen tenseness in the glands at his throat, and only half of his joints ached instead of all of them.
He was stalling, of course. Taking in the sights around him so he would not have to take in Dorian’s face. He relented eventually. He was not a coward after all.
Dorian’s face had changed little. His lips were set in a harder, thinner line. There was something burning in his eyes.
“Your father - he was killed by Orlesians.”
“Yes. But…”
“But you’ve always hinted at something else, too.”
Darva’s mind circled back once again to how unfair all this was. How he’d found a man he loved more than breath and bone, who could finish his sentences, follow the bent of his thoughts, and how he would have to leave him so soon.
“He had a wasting illness,” Darva said finally, voice quiet. “It would have killed him in months if the Orlesians hadn’t gotten to him first. And now I have it.”
The thing he had always feared, spoken plain, in the daylight. Darva looked back out over the ridge, towards Ferelden in miniature below. His horse stopped suddenly, and Darva turned back. Dorian’s hands were on his horse’s bridle, drawing them both to a stop.
“Amatus - you are certain?”
“Yes. I suspected it even before I went to the healers.” Unease gathered at the base of Darva’s spine, making him shift in the saddle. He wanted to dismount and pace, as if that would discharge it. “It’s hard to say how long I have of course. For all we know the Anchor will get me before then. Or a dragon or a darkspawn or I’ll trip over a pressure plate in one of these ruins we keep finding ourselves in and -”
Dorian’s hand was on his now, squeezing so tightly that Darva forgot to think of anything else. Darva met his gaze again. The thing burning in his lover’s eyes was tears, he realized with a jolt of anxiety, with a wave of love that threatened to sweep him away.
“Amatus - what can I do?”
Darva’s mind flashed with hundreds of flippant replies. He buried them all.
“Nothing that you aren’t already doing. And that’s okay. If anything - I hesitated to tell you this because I didn’t want you to feel like it put any kind of burden on you. You didn’t sign up for this. You don’t have to suffer just because I’m suffering. If you’d - if you’d rather end things here -”
“Stop. That’s total nonsense.” Dorian’s voice wobbled. He looked away. “Kaffas. I can’t believe you told me this now. On a horse at the start of a full day’s ride.”
Of course. Of course Darva had chosen the wrong moment. The wrong words. The same way he always did. He was no good at this. Not good enough for Dorian.
“I’m sorry. I spent all last night drumming up the courage and when I saw my opportunity I just - went for it. I shouldn’t have burdened you with this when you didn’t have time to process -”
“No.” Dorian turned back to him, edged his horse even closer, so he could reach out and cup the back of Darva’s head, drawing them even closer. “That’s not it at all, you dense and beautiful man. It is because I want nothing more than to hold you right now, and Sera is already making obscene gestures at us from down the road.”
Dorian did look at him a little differently for the rest of that day. He did seem a little more solicitous than usual. It created a spark of worry within Darva. Wasn’t this what he didn’t want? To be treated like an invalid? To have things change between them?
Then, that night, when the others had gone to bed, when it was just them and the campfire and the great black expanse of the night, the hundreds and hundreds of stars pricking through, when Dorian was finally able to hold him - that spark of worry was extinguished utterly. Because he was in the arms of the man he loved. Who loved him back. Because Dorian was warm and solid and there, and he wasn’t going anywhere, as he kept murmuring over and over against Darva’s hair.
“I’m here no matter what, amatus. You won’t face a single moment of this alone. I swear it.”
Darva wrapped himself in those words - stronger than any medicine, warmer than any blanket - and together the two of them kept night and sickness and death at bay until the sun rose, and it was enough.
the first of my prize fics from my giveaway! it was an absolute pleasure to borrow darva lavellan from @goblin-deity for a bit. :) he was lovely to write!
961 words. dorian x lavellan, light angst/fluff. happy ending. some mentions of blood, very mild gore.
***
It's red templars again. It seems, and especially so in the Emerald Graves, that there are always more of them. Always. Vivienne finds them pitiful, making quick work of any she comes across, commenting here and there on what they could have been or on templars she's known in the past, bringing little solace to Darva, though he makes no comment back. Cassandra takes on each with a sense of duty but also—which others perhaps might not notice—a sense of somberness. Regret. Silence. She's seen much and known many templars in her past and any of these might have been a friend, now corrupted and changed as much as her fellow Seekers had been, but still she fights on valiantly and without objection, and for that, Darva respects her silence.
But Dorian.
To Dorian, red templars are a game.
He knows his love too well; it's not humorous and it's not a joke and if he makes it so it's only to mask his frustration, his unfamiliarity. The red templars aren't a threat he'd known in Tevinter; for that matter, templars aren't a threat he'd know in Tevinter and yet here they are in the Emerald Graves, a land crawling with Samson's men and a battle around every corner. Give Dorian the Venatori any day and he could map his way through battling them with his eyes closed. Red templars are something else entirely.
It's on the return journey to Skyhold—nearly out of the Emerald Graves entirely, just on the northeast border of the Frostbacks—that their worst fight occurs, because of course, Darva thinks with a laugh, these things always happen just on your way out. It's a larger unit than what they usually encounter—three foot soldiers, a lieutenant, and two behemoths, all towering and massive and bursting with crimson and ruby and sharp edges all over.
They fall into their usual formation wordlessly—Cassandra charging in at the front, Darva dashing in from behind, Dorian and Vivienne in support. The footsoldiers are simple, a quick slash each to the backs of their legs, a blade to their throats and Darva's finished off all three just as Cassandra takes down the lieutenant with a final sweep of her sword. "Help Dorian!" she shouts hoarsely, wiping blood from her forehead and turning toward the behemoth making its way to Vivienne.
Dorian.
Darva whips around, tightens his grips on his knives, eyes searching the thick woods and Creators, he thinks when he finally spots him. Creators, he's too far, small in the distance but bursting with red firelight and deep greens and purples of necromancy spells and the behemoth has already reached him; he can't tell how long he's been battling it on his own but his feet scramble, trip, carry him as quickly as they can to the thick of the fight and Dorian's mocking it, taunting it; don't, Darva thinks, he wants to shout it out loud but his lungs beg for air and he can't find his voice, he's never one to shy from Dorian's jeers and teasing but his arrogance will get him into trouble one day, he worries, cursing himself for the very thought and wishing a silent prayer to the Creators that it won't be so.
He's really tired it out, actually, Darva observes when at last he arrives to the scene.
"Is that the best you've got?" Dorian sneers at the behemoth, twirling his staff with one hand and motioning it to come closer with another.
Don't.
The monstrous creature groans, swinging it's lyrium-encrusted arms one after the other at Dorian and it's all Darva can do to hurl a knife at it, offer some sort of distraction, but he's too late. Dorian's gone too far this time. The red lyrium fist knocks him off his feet, knocks the staff from his hand as he falls.
"No!" Darva shouts, jumping, leaping into the air, onto the behemoth, digging his remaining dagger into its rock-like torso and dragging the blade as he slides down, down, taking the beast down with him.
He doesn't wait to make sure it's dead, doesn't need to; he's bought himself time to see to Dorian and that's what matters and he dashes over the fallen creature, over stumps and roots and branches until he reaches his love, pulling him up carefully as he coughs the air back into his lungs.
He's okay.
And he's smiling.
Darva could strangle him for it if it weren't for the matching grin he finds himself bearing, overcome with relief and welling with happiness as he squeezes his hand once, twice, just so you know.
"Gave you a bit of a scare there, did I, amatus?" Dorian asks him, his mustache twitching upwards, laughter in his eyes as he brushes the earth and leaves off the back of his robes.
"Don't start," Darva chuckles, trying and quite likely failing to hide the shaking in his voice as he looks him over for any signs of injury. A small cut to the arm—nothing more, not this time, to his relief, and nothing they can't tend to right now. Approaching voices tell him Vivienne and Cassandra have emerged victorious from their battle as well, and Darva exhales long, deep, before removing his pack and extracting a bandage and an elfroot poultice.
"It's nothing, really," Dorian says nonchalantly as Cassandra and Vivienne rejoin them, in spite of his wince when Darva presses the poultice into the wound.
But it could've been worse.
"Yeah," he says. "Nothing."
When Dorian's wound is clean and bandaged and he's back on his feet, they're on the way back to Skyhold again, purposeful and swift, Cassandra and Vivienne taking the lead and Dorian and Darva just behind, side by side, and a little closer than before.
@solasan tagged me to make this psd! tysm darling :D <3
here’s the template
im gonna tag: @curiousstrawberry, @lavellane, @lvllns, @idrelle-miocovani, @thatdapperoctopus, and mmmmm anyone else? go for it? idk, you do you, you beautiful beans
A big giant thank you to @sunshinemage for this lovely commission of my boy, Darva! I adore how he looks so happy and content and the outfit looks great! I love it and Delph does fantastic work! <3
