Work Text:
Arpina loves like the winter.
She doesn’t seem like it—her hair is fire, her skin is sun, and her eyes are summer, but she loves as tenderly as the seeping cold and as possessively like winter refusing to give into spring. Love, to her, bests all men and drives out all forces.
Her love is like the winter, and like the winter, it can be dazzling bright and just as dangerous.
Sometimes, the winter is mild. It is sweet, even, in the way that snow falls tenderly, the way warm breath fogs in the fresh cold. Sometimes, her love is mild, like the gentle coming winter, the end of work and labor. I will do it for you, she always says. She never seems to mind it.
Other times, the winter is everything that will kill you. It is the chilling freeze, the shining icicles, the complete and utter loneliness of a blinding storm. Even the sun seems to grow feeble in the wildness of winter, and man is nothing compared to nature. It will take the strongest of men without mercy, it will hold the most powerful city in its icy grip until it is cold and blue and lifeless. What she wants, she will get, and she will never let go.
And so her love, too, is like the danger of winter, because her love comforts the freezing into the gentlest sleep, and it hungers to swallow the world whole in its eternal cold, in its eternal grasp. She makes you feel her love all the way down to the bone, until it is the only thing you are capable of feeling.
Miraak supposes, then, that even she cannot handle how her love is dazzling death and smothering life and blindingly beautiful in its danger. He has seen the way she loves mildly. Tender, soft, cold but the sort that warms your blood until you are red-cheeked in delight.
And he has seen the way she loves like a storm, how it leaves you frozen, how it takes and takes and takes until there is nothing left but the aftermath. (In the end, it hurts her the most, he realizes.) That love—that hunger cannot be stopped, not even by the gods themselves.
Miraak is no stranger to the cold. He revels in its familiarity, in how it is unchanging in its greed to take the warmth of the world for itself. And so he is nothing if not patient, and he will let Arpina love him in the only way she knows.