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🪶 dream ossuary rookanis enjoy 🪶

Lucanis wakes with a start, with the unpleasant lightning strike through the body after dreaming of falling.

Only he doesn't find himself back on the raised courtyard between the big statue and the Lighthouse.

Instead, he finds himself back in the frozen, cone-shaped cell, so deep underwater that even the suspiciously clean air feels suffocating. He's so cold even the skin between his asscheeks stands up in goosehives.

Probably because he's naked, save for the shredded fabric that he snatched from the hips of the poor soul in the cell next to his, only moments after she (Nastia, he reminds himself) had succumbed to her starvation and her hunger demon had burst out of her like filling from an overcooked pie.

Not his finest moment, there.

Lucanis rubs his forehead with a sigh.

Of course he's still here. This entire business with blighted gods and archdemons and remote brain-parasites did always seem a tad too absurd to be real.

NO! Spite shrieks. He's circling him like a vulture waiting for its food to die. Gods were real! We killed them. We tore into Ghilan'nain with our teeth! We chased Elgar'nan into Minrathous! Stuck Solas to the Veil for snatching our Rook! OUR ROOK IS REAL. SHE'S SLEEPING, RESTING. IN OUR ARMS. WHERE SHE BELONGS. OUTSIDE YOUR STUPID STUBBORN SPONGEHEAD.

As if she'd walked out of the latest romance serial, took one look at his miserable self and thought I have to have him.

NO REASONING WITH YOU HERE. RESOLVE TO BE MISERABLE. WHEN WE COULD BE FREE. FREE AND - You're surprised? There's a reason you were once Determination, before we joined.

Spite rams his elbow into the back of Lucanis' head, then dissolves into thin air.

Lucanis huffs warm air into his palms, rubs them together for friction and then wraps his hands around his toes.

There's a commotion, somewhere between the space behind his eyes and the back of his head, and he feels as though he's prodded at in another plane of existence.

SEE? Spite pushes at somebody until they kneel down in front of him. ROOK IS REAL. If she were real, she wouldn't be in here with us. She'd be far above the surface, as she should. I WOKE HER. I BROUGHT HER.

Lucanis dreads what his demon might have told her to pull her from her precious rest and into his mind. Again. Judging their trajectory lately, it likely wasn't Help us, he listens to you this time.

"Hi." There's hands on his cheeks now, and whoever it is that Spite conjured up does look exactly like the woman from his escapist dreams. Her eyes are puffy, rimmed in red - has she cried?

"What's wrong?"

Oh, so. Only real if for you to fix? That's what's happening? Shut it. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE. THEN I SHUT IT.

"Spite brought me. He thinks you went back."

Lucanis can't bite back his dry chuckle. When he pointedly looks around, her hands slip from his cheeks, cradling his jaw now.

"Evidently, I did do exactly that."

"Has.. Did something happen today, before we went to sleep, that brought you here?"

"You don't need to do this. I don't need my own subconscious trying to fix me."

Fingers twirl the ends of his hair.

"I've been here before, remember? Spite brought me then, too. He - we - don't want you to feel as though you're stuck in here by yourself."

He doesn't need to tell her he did not willingly walk in here, that sometimes he still just finds himself back in his cell. She knows. She knows intimately, by virtue of caring to know him.

"I shouldn't keep returning here," he manages, eventually. "You broke me out. I'm done with this place. There's nothing left for me, here. Not even death."

When Rook stopped being a figment of his imagination, or when she'd shifted to rock the both of them left to right to left with her cheek by his hairline, he doesn't know.

"Maybe this place isn't done with you."

Letting this, however accurate and plain to see, suggestion sit with him makes him nauseous, like trying to eat after having been hungry all day.

"How do I stop coming back here, Rook?"

Her silence and her hands in his hair, strangely grounding him into the reality of this Fade-dream with the nails on his scalp, are answer enough.

Eventually, she sits back down, cross-legged, takes his hands.

He knows what that means; I have an idea.

Do it! Spite leans over her shoulder, pushing her deeper into her hunched posture with both hands on her back like he was trying to mount a horse from its backside. Rook has good ideas! Rook is smart! She will fix us. Splitting us is not in her repertoire. Breaking us out of here is!

"Well, for this specific instance, there's multiple options of what we can do," she starts. She's barefoot, too, the tops of her feet pushing into his soles. "If you'd rather be alone, I can leave - Spite won't like that, and neither do I, frankly. I don't want to leave you alone here."

She must be real, Lucanis thinks after all. How else would he know the way the space between her brows creases means But your feelings in this matter more than mine?

"But if that's what you need, you shall have it. We could leave this place together, too. Or, we could stay here together. Whichever you want. Whatever you need. If it's for me to give to you, you will have it. I promise."

He looks up from their feet, when her hand settles soft and warm and startingly familiar on his jaw, her thumb through his beard.

"I.. I can't get up."

Rook nods.

"Would you like me to stay?"

"I... If you'd rather leave-"

"I know. That's not what I asked."

Her eyes are wide and soft and endlessly loving.

"Stay. Please. Just a little longer."

"Of course."

It should be intimidating, the way she rises to stand before him, fingers working the cord that holds her dressing gown closed.

Were it anyone other than Rook, he would be, deep down. He'd never display it, of course, but he'd still feel it.

With her, though, he can freely display his - concern. Why is she undressing? In the prison of his brain?

"Rook, no. You're barefoot. We're encased in a cone of ice. You'll be so cold. Don't take off your dressing gown."

But he doesn't fight her, and the soft yellow silk-lined robe drapes warm and comforting over his shoulders.

"I am wearing more than a loincloth. I'll be all right."

Even here, somehow, in this nightmare prison that his mind keeps returning to, it's baffingly easy and natural to settle against her. She willingly offers her warmth to him, shifts with him like that's all she's made to do.

Eventually, he's curled up on his side, covered up to his eyes by the gown, her right hand rubbing his arm through the fabric and the other petting his hair.

As he closes his eyes, there's the start of a giggle in Rook's throat, hastily bitten back and covered with a breath.

"What?"

"Your ears are so small. And round. Small and round and cute."

"Is that.. good?"

"I think so. I tried to picture you with ears like mine and - no. Your ears are perfect like this."

"Thank you?"

Her body curves above him, and her lips press against his forehead. It must be a strain in her neck, how she's curling to meet him with his head in her lap.

But when he attempts to rise, to meet her halfways her hand slips from his arm to his chest and pushes him back down.

So he shifts until all his weight isn't squarely on the joint of his shoulder. Closing his eyes again under her gentle touch and soothing warmth is an easy thing. Even here.

Were he not so confused and tired and therefore sopping up her soul as though the Ossuary turned him into a wet biscuit, he might be a little scared of all that.

"How do you like your eggs?"

"I'm sorry?" He almost can't hear it, his left ear cushioned by her thigh on all sides, Spite trilling happily at her scratching over his scalp in the other.

"When we wake up, I'll make you breakfast, for a change. Something nice and simple."

"You don't have to. I know you don't enjoy cooking."

"I want to, Lucanis. Let me do something for you, just this once." He knows she'll say the exact same thing she resolves to cook for him the next time. And the time after that. And probably for the rest of all time, if she'll have him. "So: how do you like your eggs?"

"Sunny on bread."

Her thigh shifts under him, and her lips press against his right ear.

"Sunny on bread you shall have."

Instead of leaving, however, she settles down beside him, her thigh still cushioning his head, the crown of hers barely in his lap.

"After you wake up. After you have a long, long, well-deserved rest, and wake up in my arms at the Lighthouse. At home."

She says more, but he soon falls away into sleep, when she drapes her dressing gown over him like a blanket once more and reaches for his hand under the fabric.

He wakes again, before her, this time, though his face no longer lies squared in her lap.

There's no blanket covering him - it must be somewhere near the end of the bed - but Rook's body against his back is enough to to warm him through an entire Age of winter.

Her fingers are hooked into the seam of his pants, her breath warm on the back of his neck.

Sunlight filters through the massive fishtank, into the hidden corner where their bed sits.

A marvel, that. Their bed. For her and him.

See? Real. All of it. You're right. And thank the Maker for that.

A bare legs hooks over his hip.

Lucanis closes his eyes again.

well, if bioware didnt want me to go insane they shouldn't have given him big brown wet puppy eyes

(gif by me i made this)

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🪶 rookanis blurb to plug my commission 🪶

Rook laughs at him as soon as she sees him, the instant she stops rubbing the sleep from her eyes, runs her fingers through her hair instead.

"What?"

"You've got ink all over your - well, your everything."

Lucanis looks at his hands, and true: there's ink stains well into his shirtsleeve.

He mutters under his breath, rolls up his sleeves, but there's already black bleeding into the fabric. He must have pulled the cuffs down before the ink had a chance to dry.

"Sorry," Rook says as she approaches, somehow already armed with a sponge, handsoap, a bowl of water and a towel.

"For what? You didn't dip me into a vat of ink, did you?"

She doesn't shy away from him, leans into his fingers brushing her hair from her eyes. Uncaring of the way he might stain her purple.

"No." Her nail replaces the sponge, picking at his wet skin like scab from a wound. "I didn't stay up while Spite was using it, though. I was just so tired, and I didn't think he'd go on to extend his canvas onto your skin once he'd run out of parchment."

NO. DID NOT WAKE HER, Spite says before the thought can even take root in Lucanis' head. Know where ink and parchment lives. Got up for drink, ruffled hair. Have fun, Spite almost sounds like her now, and Lucanis somehow remembers her hand fleetingly sliding across the width of his shoulders, once on the way out, once again on the way back into the sheets. Very quiet. Out of parchment, but the drawer grinds and squeaks. Didn't want to wake her.

The shaky lines, circles and spirals suddenly look a lot like a child's first attempt at writing letters, just before the soapwater and sponge wash them away into grey rivulets that drip from his hairs onto the floor.

"We talked about this, querida. You don't need to watch my demon. You're not my nursemaid."

A smile threatens to tug at Rook's mouth, while she moves the sponge across his forearm slowly, deliberately, purposely displaying the opal ring that's been sitting on her finger for less than a month.

"Well. I think at this point it's safe to say he's our demon, right?"

YES. OURS. ALL OURS. OUR ROOK. OUR LUCANIS. OUR SPITE. OURS OURS OURS.

Spite keeps cheering even as the words break out of Lucanis' mouth and Rook laughs so hard she spills the water in the bowl over the both of them.

🪶

this is spite the night before:

🪶 wound care rookanis enjoy 🪶

"It's just.. disrespectful. Honorless. Rude, even. Downright insolent."

Not even a twitch in her eye when the alcohol runs into the wound.

"Fairness looks different."

"You fought venatori and expected fairness? That may be on you, amore."

Eyes roll. Like marbles. Whose? Hers, or the Venatori's?

Two rapid blinks from Spite's finger in her waterline. Right now, hers. Annoyance. Anger. Patience and impatience at once. Soon? Venatori eyes. Pull them out like babes from mothers.

"Yes, fine. But still. You don't just go for a girl's earring and yank. What if the jewellery is cheap and just breaks apart instead of tearing skin? Got up close for nothing."

"I did ask you not to wear the big hoops," Lucanis reminds her, gently.

But they glitter! So pretty! Sun and rain and sparkle on her ear. And now, they hurt her. They bring nice things to Dock Town! You just like that the gems are purple. Purple like sugarplum. Purple like me.

The way Rook's eyes move to her side to watch him thread the needle, without putting pressure or new dirt onto the torn lobe must hurt her, he thinks.

Give her a headache behind the eyes like the one he has every waking minute at the Lighthouse. And most sleeping minutes, too.

The instant relief he feels from stepping out of an eluvian and into just about anywhere else than the Fade is delicious, like the gentle ache after stretching deeply through tension.

The instant relief she doesn't feel right now, because she keeps trying to watch him.

"But I look so good in them!"

The needletip is barely in her flesh before he stops.

Stills.

Not because he's re-adjusting his angle, or second-guessing his skill.

"You look good no matter what you wear," he says, so quietly he himself couldn't hear it if the sound didn't naturally run through his own body as well as the world. "You're always beautiful."

She turns pink, almost as pink as her hair in the sun. He sees it on the tip of her ear, not her face.

Even after so long, he can't speak these things out loud and look at her face.

"Even when I broke you out? Soaked to the bones, my hair so wet it clung straight to my body, almost down to my knees?"

Bright like sun. Shines to bottom of the sea. Only her. Brighter THAN sun. Sun doesn't reach there. Soft like furs and fire and sweets. Warm like soup and blankets.

"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

She collects his hand from her ear, kisses each and every knuckle.

"So are you." And then she runs the alcohol rag over his hand before releasing it to get back to work.

A single drop of blood pushed past the needle, drops down to the tabletop. It doesn't stain the wood, not the way it stains the other studs in her ear.

Once he's done, he'll rub the alcohol onto them, as well. keep everything nice and clean.

That is, until she goes to sleep, face down in her pillow, her hair everywhere.

"Is this okay?"

Rook frowns, but not at him. Not at the needle pulling the thread in and out of her ear.

"Yes, of course. I trust you. Only two types of people who know sewing."

"Seamsters and Crows?"

A short, barking laugh, ready to fall into her habit of laughing way too hard at things she finds mildly amusing at best, because they were things that came out of his mouth. Then catching herself, remembering the needle in her ear.

"Yes. And you are a Crow who mends his own clothes. I think you can handle sewing up two pieces of loose skin. They're not even entirely loose. They're still attached to my face. Kind of."

"Still. You know what my scars look like."

Voicing that out loud makes him work all the slower, double-checking that the stitches are exactly where they should be, that the thread is tight enough, wipes the stray blood after every pinch to make sure there's no clotting.

Her huff is dismissive. She may as well wave away the comment with her arm.

But her hands have long returned to idly fiddling with the bottom hem of her blouse.

"It's different when you're sewing yourself up. You may only have one hand to do it." She blindly pats the tabletop beneath her. Almost leaning into his touch. "And not have the thing you're sewing up propped up on a table."

"Let me just knot this up for you."

"Can you put a little bow in it?"

"So that tomorrow a Venatori you let come up close can pull it? I don't think so."

"I let come up close? Lucanis, we fight with blades. Getting up close is the only way we know how to fight. It's what we do."

Spite motions out longbows, greatswords and warhammers. Then throwing daggers.

Spite doesn't know how weight distribution works.

We can learn. Wield longest weapon for her. Keep enemies off.

She'll be upset if we don't let her dance, Spite, you know that.

But she'll be safe. No torn ears, no plucked eyes.

But a miserable, resentful Rook for the rest of our time together. And that time won't be very long.

Safe means long life! But she'll leave. As she should.

Spite hates it when Lucanis is right.

Lucanis stands, pulls Rook to sit upright on the table. She instantly reaches for the mirror, twisting it, and herself, to peek at his handiwork outside of her peripheral.

"Oh, it looks cute. Even without a bow."

"You know you will have to get it re-pierced once it's healed, if you want to put your hoop in again."

"I know." She says it around a huff. For now, she's still intent to keep her hair away from it.

"Will you do it for me?"

"I.. I don't know that I can."

"You can stab, you can sew. Wound and heal. Seems like it's learned easily to me."

Rook leans into him as she points it out, her fingertips sliding beneath his layers and into his waistband. Chin on his chest. Looking up at him lazily.

"Fine," he says.

As though the word no was one he knows, when it comes to things she asks of him.

As though it was even a part of him when it comes to her.

🪶 "i miss you" rookanis enjoy 🪶

Lucanis could have collected every finger of his every last target and still not have enough to count the times he's heard the echo of his own name being yelled through the Villa's halls bouncing off its many walls.

Summonings. Illario getting into trouble. Their other cousins ratting him out and Illario drawing Lucanis into it, as well.

The countless times Caterina stood on the fourth step from the ground, yelling his name like she'd caught him to lure him out of his hiding place. The countless times he fell for it.

The quiet fury when he'd still not gotten up for breakfast even after the fifth servant tried to rouse him with a young messere and knuckles rapping against his door.

Yells that imply abuse and punishment and shouts of leather belts whipped across his growing shoulders.

The sound of his father coughing out his name, cut down in front of him as his nursemaid hauls him to safety through the hidden corridors inside the walls.

Never before, though, did it come accompanied with the thud of a heavy bag hitting the ground and flat, nimble feet losing their shoes as he's trying to find a hidden corner to have his coffee and his book.

Rook is sprinting across the foyer and hurling herself into his arms like a drunk man into sheets. Coffee splatters against a jacket and his book falls to the ground.

"You're home."

"So are you."

"This is my house!"

Rook's lips, already inside his collar, split into a smile, teeth against his skin. Her fingers grab the mouth of his coffee cup, steadying it mid-air, to keep the liquid in the porcelain and off her clothes.

"Like you'd ever say no to an opportunity to get out of here."

"If it means I can't be there waiting for you to come back? I would never."

Rook pulls him into her embrace again, so tight he has to hold on to the small of her back, but they tip back against the door, anyway. The handle digs uncomfortably into skin and muscle below the left shoulder blade.

"I missed you so much, Lucanis. I've gotten used to having you along for every single job."

"Well." He pushes against her, his hand moving to the side of her hip, until she sinks back down onto her heels and he can detangle them - just enough to shuffle to the sofa hidden in the corner. "That can be rectified easily enough."

"How?" She pulls at him easily, making him rest against her like it's all they both were made to do. "People will notice the First Talon running along on another House's jobs."

"Rectified easily enough," he says, again.

A snort, somewhere above him. "Good luck hashing that out with Viago."

"First Talon. Stealing a Crow. I don't have to hash out anything with Viago."

There's a beat of silence.

It's rare for him to have the last word when talking to Rook. On the (so very rare that it borders on inexistent) occassion that she doesn't have a retort, it's usually Spite taking her side, on principle.

No matter how often they've both tried to explain to him that they're not on opposing sides. They never have been.

But you're wrong so often. So is Rook. Different kind. Curious kind. Fuck around and find out kind. You're wrong because you're stubborn. You say that as though you weren't. As though she wasn't. Different kind. Does that mean a better kind?

Spite pauses, slinks down from his toe tips and stops trying to catch the flame of the wall candle with the splitting overgrowth of his fingernails.

No. Just Different.

"Oh, before I forget!"

Rook moves out from her position as his backrest and retrieves a poorly bound collection of papers.

"So, bad news, my contract was on the author of that serial you've started the other night."

"The Truths Between?"

A hum, affirmative.

She says it as though they hadn't taken turns reading it aloud to one another.

"But the good news is: I brought you the manuscript for the last part."

The bundle of papers is dropped into his lap. The sheets are crumpled, bloodstained, the stitches holding them together uneven, the thread just a little too thick, dissolving a little where it emerges from the needlehole.

Like the author had been led to believe hastily binding and handing out the manuscript would leave them alive.

But that's not Rook's way to do it. He doesn't think. From the way she moves on the open battlefield, even cutting the Dread Wolf's hand to tie him to the Veil when she just as well could have pinned him to it with his own dagger through his heart - a killer, yes, flamboyant, yes, but not deceitful, or cruel. Never that.

Which means someone else tried to kill them before she ever got to him. Perhaps even before the contract reached Viago's desk.

Something to look into. Later. Tomorrow, maybe.

For now...

"Last part? Does that mean you read it?"

"Yeah."

"How do you feel about it?"

Lucanis knows, with every fibre of himself, that Rook would never ruin the ending for him. Nothing he, or anyone else, could ever say to her would make her spill it.

Not until he's read the ending himself and asks to discuss it with her.

Lucanis also knows, also with every fibre of himself, that right now, she's dying to tell him.

He can tell from the crease in her lips, the furrow between her brows, from the way her index slides off the pages and taps impatiently against his knee.

It's terrible. You don't know that. The serial is terrible. The ending will be terrible. Look at her. She HATES it. You hate the serial, Spite. Don't impose your thoughts and feelings onto her expression.

Spite opens his mouth, then clamps it back shut again instantly when they hear Rook inhaling to finally speak.

"Ettore doesn't deserve all that."

Something about the deadpan, resigned way the words escape her mouth, as if Ettore were an old friend of theirs who keeps getting into difficult dalliances with habitually unfaithful people, makes Lucanis burst out laughing.

He laughs and laughs until the sound of a vase shattering against tiles, followed by the rough, sleep-deepened voice of his grandmother shouting runs through the halls like children through tall grass.

Even when he and Rook collect their things and quietly make their way back to their own chambers, he's still giggling to himself.

🪶 job alternatives rookanis enjoy 🪶

"Have you ever wondered what you would do every day if you weren't a Crow?"

Lucanis shrugs. The motion makes him pull the wooden spoon from the pot a little too quickly, and some of the mushroom sauce splashes onto his waistcoat. He purses his lips, a wet sound from between his tongue and his teeth, as he dips his fingers into his water cup and keeps the stain wet.

"Living the quiet life while waiting for Caterina to marry me off, I suppose."

Bare, freckled arms wrap around him suddenly, blindly threading the buttons from their holes and sliding the waistcoat from his shoulders. Rook sits down on one of the bar chairs she pulls from the storage under the stairs, dipping a fabric brush into a wooden bowl full of soapwater balanced in her lap and scrubbing at the stain over her knee before it can dry.

How she got all of this to happen so quickly, he doesn't know.

She's always buzzing, Spite says, legs spread and arms around her waist as though he's sitting on the stool with her. Her hair cuts into - through - his face. Humming like a bee, a petted cat. Like sun on water and lights in Minrathous.

Lucanis frowns, and can hear Rook's question, even without looking at her, over the bubbling sauce and the salt-grilled meat, even before she says it. So he elaborates.

"Spite says he can hear the lights in Minrathous."

"You can't?" Her tone is confused enough, and earnest, so much so it makes him look up at her, her cheeky smile making rows of dimples in her skin. She was joking. He can't keep his own smile from his face, and that makes her snort.

Spite cackles, fingers clawing into Rook's belly so he doesn't fall from the chair. You believed! Rook can't hear lights. Can't hear Fade. Stupid Lucanis!

She stops scrubbing at the stain for a moment, regarding him quietly. If it were anyone else looking at him this intensely, it would make him so very uncomfortable.

"I meant, if it were just you. If you could do whatever you want."

"I never thought about that before. So much in my life has been decided for me."

Rook dips the brush in the soapwater again. Lucanis takes care to be slow, measured, when he transfers the pasta into the sauce. Rook wouldn't mind at all if he got more stains on himself and undressed his shirt, as well.

But then they would be neither talking nor eating, and at least one of them should make sure their bellies are filled.

"I think, maybe you'd have a Tavern. You'd get to cook all day, every day."

Therapist, Mother, Maid.

"Ah, but cooking is a hobby for me. Never pursure your hobbies for money, Rook."

"Well, people don't pay anyone to read or sleep. Or eat."

"There are food critics in this world. Food tasters, too." He cups his hand under the tasting spoon he leads to her mouth, to prove his point.

Good food. Good Rook. Better food makes better Rook. Rook is perfect as she is. You can make her perfecter! I don't need to. You COULD. Fine, I'll bite; what is she lacking in?

Spite pauses, looking at the way Rook's body dents under his fingers, her hair only barely not tickling in his nose.

She can't see me. I want to be seen. I want HER to see. I'll talk to Emmrich. PROMISE! Spite, I promise to talk to Emmrich about what can be done - after dinner. YES!

Rook is oblivious to their discussion, wrapping her lips around the whole spoon and humming, then snatching the spoon from him to steal another mouthful from the pan.

"Mmh, that's good. But you wouldn't want your Rook to go check if King Marcus is being poisoned once again, would you?"

"But you wouldn't be my Rook, would you?"

NO! No world without! Lucanis. Spite. Rook. Together. Match like ass to bucket. Spite wraps his arms around her tighter, like garrotting someone under their own weight rather than rope.

Lucanis reaches under Rook's thighs, grabs the stool and pulls her close. She shrieks in delight, abandons bowl, brush and waistcoat to the floor with little more than a careless shove from her lap.

"And if you weren't my Rook, then where would we be?" He kisses her big front teeth, because she breaks into a grin before he meets her lips.

"I mean, it's not like I had much of a choice in my career choice, either," Rook starts, answering a question he'd already forgotten between the simmering food, his demon rocking himself and their Rook so forcefully it makes the stool creak, and her sweet lips. Her fingers work to tuck his shirt back into his pants as he straightens up. "I'm told my father abandoned me at the bottom of the Chantry stairs, and the lay sister that found me sold me to Brother Benito."

"Why would an orphange buy orphans?' He prepares a small tasting plate for Rook; the longer it stays on the fire now, the more the flavor will infuse, and he wants to make sure it's the right flavor.

"To sell them off to the Crows and whorehouses for insane markup to feed the ones that won't sell." She shrugs, and some of the sauce drips off the plate and onto her pants. She doesn't notice.

"Or I would've become a market monger. Ugh, the horror." She shudders. "Did you overhear the poor girl in Dock Town the other day?"

"Remind me?"

"Outside the fancy bakery, who told her customer all the quiche flavors she had, twice."

"Ah, yes. With the little hand-written labels on everything."

"Yeah, and the customer pointed to the spinach one that said Spinach on the label, and asked which one that was, and she went, the spinach one, and the customer asked if there's spinach in it." She rubs circles into her temples in frustration, just from the memory of it. "I would've shoved it down their throat in one piece and told them to tell me."

Lucanis laughs.

"You would."

"So, I get it. I never thought about it, either. My employment perspective sucks any way you slice it - well." She pauses, and as she stands from the stool, to put it pack in its place and set the table, it almost looks like she's holding on to Spite for balance, almost like she's waiting for him to stand first.

"Maybe the whorehouse would've worked out okay; I like having sex."

And because she knows his mind, his heart and his soul, instead of going about her business, she leans against the countertop next to him, a hand on his elbow and turning his face to look at her.

She knows something she said troubles him, even with her back turned, only from sensing the way his troubles roll off his shoulders.

"What's wrong?"

There's no accusation, never accusations with her, only genuine interest and desire to help.

Speaking of these things are easier for him if he can pretend he's muttering to himself, so he puts his entire focus on moving the pasta around in the sauce with a flick of his wrist.

"Does it bother you?" He can barely hear his own words over the sizzling and swooshing of his cooking.

"Does what bother me?" Lucanis makes a face and a noise, and in his periphery, he can see the puzzle pieces assembling in Rook's mind. "What? No! Why would you - because I just said I enjoy having sex."

Her hand wraps around his, makes him put down pan and spoon. Pulls him to her chest, squeezes so tight he might burst like an overfull waterskin.

"I thought - well, I've heard people describe my speed as, slow. Annoingly slow."

"To your face?" He shakes his head. The motion makes her earrings chime as they brush against one another.

"Don't wor- try not to worry about this, all right?" She squeezes a kiss to his ear. "I enjoy secretly adding needless punctuation to Viago's letters, and I don't do that a whole lot, either. Everything's fine. At some point, we'll look at each other and all we'll want is to make each other feel good. I can wait for that point."

"You shouldn't have to constantly wait for me."

Her left hand lifts from his ribs, then a scratch: shaking the pan so the food doesn't burn. Her right hand holds on to him all the tighter.

"Your feelings in this matter more than mine, Lucanis." She hears him inhale, feels his chest shift against hers with his expanding lungs. Instead of gripping, her right hand turns to lightly patting against his spine. "I know what that sounds like. I didn't say my feelings don't matter. What I mean is, we'll go at the pace you feel comfortable with, because this is new for you. And that's okay."

She readily accepts him, once he gathers his courage and moves back up to kiss her, both hands on his jaws, her shoulders, tipping her back over the countertop, her bottom lip escaping him only when a stray thought breaks her into a grin.

"I have two hands and ten fingers; I'll manage."

SEE? She does it! I told you!

They laugh and kiss and are so enveloped inside of their cocoon that he almost doesn't hear the heavy doors push open, a low-pitched gross is shoved into the air, and the doors pull back closed.

Rook, already grabbing him by the collar and pulling him back over her arched back, laughs so hard he kisses teeth instead of lips.

🪶 Lucanis' Log Book W7 - Free Day 🪶

[bitch i never posted it lol]

Morning:

- Change sheets (beetroot stains)

- Breakfast: charcuterie, sour dough bread, quince jelly

Rook made me try her lemon water instead of coffee. Just removed enough from tea to not spit it back out.

Will make cioccolata calda for her every morning from now on.

Midday:

- Bath, fresh clothes

- Reading

Afternoon:

- Reading

Can't remember last day I had nothing to do.

Evening:

- Dinner by Rook: gnocchi with leek, mushrooms, cream sauce

Delicious

- Knitting (Rook reads out loud)

Might get used to the lazy life.

🪶 bone-reading rookanis ft. emmrich enjoy 🪶

The motion of rubbing his thumb along the muscles in Rook's neck has grown familiar enough for Lucanis to only half-focus on it.

The other half of his focus, naturally, lands on the way Emmrich's eyes, across the table and slightly misty from the tea steam on his spectacles, linger on his fingers around her spine just that one moment too long for it to be a gaze of settling-on-nothing-in-particular.

Rook doesn't notice. She's too focused on his fingers for the both of them. In a way, she's the other half of his focus. Closing her eyes, sighing out a breath so deep that it softens the flesh around his own ribcage as well as hers.

Bliss, even, just a little. She sways, like she's fighting the urge to relax into him entirely and fall asleep, even through the ache his clumsy massage causes.

She doesn't mind it. Not when he's the one pushing the force into the fibers. Kind of a sweet pain, she calls it. One that I know will help. For the day, if not the long run.

Emmrich's gaze doesn't shift. It almost feels like he's dissecting the way her skin shifts with his massage with an academic focus the likes of which Lucanis has never witnessed before.

It's thorough enough to make him uncomfortable enough for the both of them, even though he's not the one being examined.

"Did you need anything, Emmrich?"

Lucanis supposes he shouldn't be surprised that Emmrich does not appear to feel like he's been caught red-handed. He takes a sip from his tea with barely even a blink.

"Rook, If I may-"

Rook flicks her eyes open. To Emmrich, it may look non-chalant, with a speck of curiosity, even. But to Lucanis... Lucanis knows the miniscule twitch in her lid; one of annoyance. She'd just started to melt into the comfort his probing hands were about to offer. And Emmrich's inquiry that's just bound to be strange is solidifying her again before she even had the chance to flow apart.

How easily he can interpret her features now. Easy as breathing. As though he never learned anything else but reading her. Like the years and years he spent training his trade was little more than preparation; preparation to retain every last detail of her.

Their time together feels - again - like many many years and just a few days at the same time.

It always does, when Lucanis stops to ponder their relationship. He's been doing a lot of that, lately. His every stray thought eventually circling back to Rook, to Rook and him, to them. He could spot mud beneath a child's toenails, and he'd end up thinking of the healing clay she puts on her skin while her hair soaks in beetroot.

It doesn't feel scary anymore, though. It stopped being scary long ago.

And like it shook him to his bones only yesterday.

Alas.

"I noticed a blockage within the vertebrae of your cervical spine, when last I examined you."

Emmrich continues, oblivious to where his mind had wandered off to even without Spite. Beneath his nails, Rook's neck grows more and more tense with every letter past the mage's mouth.

"What's that?" Rook barely moves her eye inside her skull to glance over to him. As if Lucanis knows what Emmrich is on about, ever.

His eye's turn to twitch, now. I don't know either.

But his fingers do turn to purposeful probing. If he puts his undivided focus on what he feels under her skin, he just might-

Ah, yes. Indeed. The bumps in her spine feel so much less pronounced in one place that he struggles to make them out at all.

So, when her eye flicks back toward him, he makes sure to meet her gaze directly for once, so he can be certain she sees his slightest of nods. Barely even that, barely more than a twitch in his own muscles, but still.

Emmrich is correct, Lucanis has tested it, so Rook can know with even more certainty than usual that Emmrich is correct.

"Oh, the formation of skeletal features is a most fascinating subject."

Lucanis can already see Emmrich in a lecture hall, circling parts of elaborate sketches on the board with expensive coloured chalk, eyes lighting up in excitement beyond anything this plane has seen before.

"Fascinating is one word for it, sure," Rook replies.

Not the kind of fascinating I aspire to be, Lucanis hears her answer, somewhere small and quiet between them.

"Most skeletal components present some deformity. For instance, the second metatarsal of Manfred's right foot is shorter than the others."

Where Manfred suddenly appeared from, Lucanis doesn't know, but the skeleton does employ Spite's help to pull off the boots. The way they twist his calves to present the old bones one after another makes Lucanis think the legs should break in the knees, like snapping a leg off the roast chicken.

Emmrich watches it like he's half-ready to stitch him back together with thread and magic. Lucanis could swear he already sees the air quiver around the off-white that is Manfred. He should be more upset. He was there, at the Manor. There should be a lot more distress on Emmrich's part over far lesser injuries.

But the man continues talking about the way Daisy's spine is shaped and how much of an anatomical interest it creates inside him, with all the casualness of spreading butter on bread.

"I would love to take a look at it. Maybe take notes. Even have a model made, perhaps."

Rook doesn't seem to mind as much as Lucanis thinks he would.

"Fair enough."

She moves away from his hands and shifts in her chair so she is fully facing him. Her hair falls over his arm, still on the back of her chair, as she brushes it out of the way for Emmrich to start his own, medical, prodding.

"Alas-" Emmrich still stands up and rounds the table. "I have never been blessed with the skill of crafting useful anatomical sketches from touch alone. If I could see it without the skin and muscle-"

Rook moves away from Emmrich's prodding fingers faster than Lucanis has seen her move in a while. Turns around to look up at him.

If Lucanis reached out to push her hair out of the way, he thinks he could see the tan skin slowly turning red. Irritation.

"Are you asking to cut open my neck and look at my bones while they're still inside my body and drawing blood?!"

At almost break-neck pace, Emmrich's hands return to curling awkwardly before his torso. He's almost stammering.

"Bones don't draw blood, Rook." A measly offer, appealing to the baser knowledge drilled into the both of them long ago.

And her? She offers a deal to the mage. Like the offense three sentences earlier never happened.

One of these days, he'll get whiplash, just witnessing her jumping from one topic to another, from emotion to emotion to emotion, all within two deep, exhausting breaths because there was so much to talk about that she forgot to come up for air.

"I will burn in the same pyre Lucanis does once I kick it-" Lucanis chokes on his coffee at that; both at the concept of her death and at her complete and utter devotion to him, compressed into that flippant half-statement.

Even so, as she twists her neck to fully face Emmrich behind her, so far that it would hurt even Lucanis - who's never had neck pain even an hour of his life - her fingers blindly wander over to him, curling around where his femur joins his knee and squeezing lightly. The question with it, both spoken and unspoken between them. You all right?

The sound that comes out of him is hoarse and challenging. As though he was trying to produce coffee grounds from his lungs the second he drew the first breath of his life.

But it does placate Rook. The squeeze around his leg turns gentler, her thumb shifting to draw absent-minded patterns into the fraying seam of the pantleg.

"But between my death and my funeral, Emmrich, you may cut it open and look."

"Rook you're barely 30," Emmrich replies, deadpan, at the same time that Lucanis says Rook, You're Twenty-Eight.

Rook shrugs.

"You may look once I'm dead. How you still draw breath by then is your business."

Emmrich opens his mouth, brows knit tight, ready to retort, but before the wind can escape his lungs - clock chime.

Lucanis pulls her up, and she easily lets him, even with her face turned away from him and her most vulnerable parts presented to him wide open.

That display of trust, no matter how often he gets to witness it from her, hits harder knowing what they both do by trade.

"It's late, Rook. We should start packing."

"You mean, I should start packing."

He doesn't need to mention his wonder at her unbothered state. They're meant to leave for Rivain by nightfall at the absolute latest. It's well past noon already, and Rook barely changed out of her nightclothes.

"I'll help you," he offers. "You throw your things to me and I'll sort them into the bag."

"I won't chuck my cream tin at you!"

Lucanis shrugs. Even as he walks backwards to pull her across the yard and into her room. It comes more natural to him than he thought, copying his mannerisms.

"Spite's thrown worse."

HAVEN'T SAID A WORD ALL DAY! NOT FAIR!