Chapter Text
“Mi amor, are you coming downstairs?” Lucanis asked, walking so brusquely into their bedroom in the Villa that it had sweat trickling down his back in the oppressive heat of a boiling Trevisan summer evening. “It is not like you to miss dinner. Was the Magisterium that bad today?”
A quick scan of the room made him sigh; she wasn’t in here either. Perhaps she was still in Minrathous, he thought, but as he was about to turn and leave, he spotted the door to the adjoining washroom standing ajar. Eyes narrowing, he made for it just to double-check, before beginning the long trek to the Eluvian three floors below.
When Lucanis rounded the bed, however, a too-familiar foot on the floor came into view, the leg it was attached to at an angle too askew. Suddenly, the heat of the day making him sweat was irrelevant; his blood ran colder than ice in his veins as his heart plunged through his stomach.
“Maribel,” he gasped, rushing around the foot of the bed.
Dropping to his knees next to her naked body, the impact against the marble floor rattled his teeth, but he was too distracted to care—too busy, in truth, suppressing the panic rising high enough to close his throat. It was a small mercy that there were no outwardly apparent wounds visible to him, but his fingers reached for her throat regardless. A pulse beat steadily beneath them, if slightly elevated.
Lucanis sucked in a breath. “Maribel?” he asked, hardly daring to believe it.
Eyes cracked open enough for him to see a slit of blue staring back at him miserably. Lucanis cradled her face in his hands, his touch gentle, yet firm enough to try and keep her with him.
“Mi amor, what happened? Who did this to you?” He snarled.
Rook shook her head, and it was fainter than he would have liked. “No one.”
No one? That she saw, perhaps? His eyes left her to dart around the room now. Nothing was out of place—though that might be expected if a Crow was involved—but his gaze did land on a goblet on her nightstand.
“Did you pour that yourself?” Lucanis asked, and she nodded, but it didn’t dissuade him. The cup itself could have been poisoned. “How long ago did you drink it?”
Mind immediately flipping through how long various poisons needed to take effect, he reached up and lifted one of her eyelids, but she swatted his hand away. He persisted until she let him get a look at both of her pupils. They were normal.
“I don’t know,” she said, irritation starting to creep into her voice. “I brought it with me from my office.”
Lucanis frowned. Though he didn’t delude himself that the Magisterium was strictly safe for her, the politicians there, at least, were more likely to stab you in the chest with a cold smile rather than engage in the subterfuge his own organization was famous for. He sat back, just a little, thinking hard about the recent contracts he had seen cross his desk, wondering if he had missed something.
“Lucanis, relax,” Rook told him, brushing gentle fingertips over the forearm holding his weight above her. “I laid down on the floor myself.”
He looked at her, his brow furrowing so hard it nearly hurt. “Why? And why for the love of Andraste are you naked?”
“Because the marble is at least somewhat cool, and I couldn’t bear those robes a second longer.” Rook paused, swallowing heavily, her eyes looking like they might cry. “It’s so hot.”
The whine in her voice was unmissable. He could do nothing but blink at her for a moment.
“That’s it? You’re telling me you gave me a heart attack because you can’t handle a little heat off the bay?”
Nodding, she started weakly waving the hand fan she held. He had missed that particular detail in his panic, as he had the pillow beneath her head.
“How do you Antivans live like this?” she croaked.
“You’re fine?” he pressed.
“Just fucking melting.”
The groan that escaped him was half relieved, half agonized as he deflated onto her, pressing his face into her breastbone.
“Lucanis,” she protested, pushing at him, but she didn’t move him an inch. “It’s too hot for this.”
Realizing that he probably shouldn’t crowd her if she had been brought so low by summer, Lucanis pushed away from her, sitting on the floor beside her with his back to the mattress. He rested his forearms on his knees, steepling his fingers against his lips and contemplating the ceiling for a moment, forcing his breathing to slow. After a few minutes, he turned and gave her a look that might have chilled her, if her eyes were open.
“Are you aware how many of my contracts end with a body on the floor?” he asked through gritted teeth.
“Hopefully not naked ones.”
He scowled. Even flat on the floor, she couldn’t help herself from prodding him.
“Maribel.”
“Sorry,” she said, having the grace to at least sound somewhat repentant at his tone. “I can handle humidity, but paired with this heat? I am miserable.”
Sighing, he knew there was some truth to her words; he remembered how she would get after a long day of killing Antaam in the hot sun of the Rivaini coast. It was only after getting her situated in the shade of the dining hall with a large glass of water and some salty crackers that she’d stop getting snippy with everyone. Not to mention that today had been hotter than he could remember Treviso being in quite some time. His eyes softened as they roamed the familiar canvas of her body stretched over the floor, though his regard remained dispassionate.
“I think I like you better shivering under a blanket,” Lucanis muttered as he looked away. He ran a hand over his face, wiping away the sweat from his own brow.
Rook moved a few inches to her right, closer to him, like the marble she’d been laying on had gotten too warm beneath her. The sound of her skin sticking to it as she moved was so loud in the quiet room it nearly made him wince.
“I think I do too,” she grumbled.
But maybe the marble wasn’t the only reason she peeled herself closer to him, because her fingers curled around his booted ankle. Lucanis couldn’t help but shake his head at the small tug of his lips at such a simple touch.
“Just… give me a warning next time. Please?”
“Next time I’m turning right around and going back to Minrathous,” she said, and he could hear the teasing in her voice despite the fading of her efforts in fanning herself. “At least we understand the importance of good airflow in our buildings.”
Lucanis leaned over and snatched the fan from her hand so he could do it for her with more vigor. The look of bliss that washed over her face was so absolute he didn’t think he had even seen it on her in the throes of passion. “Maker, you’re ridiculous. Did you forget you are a mage with the gift of ice magic?”
“Would you have preferred to find me in chunks of frozen, shattered, then melted flesh because I never quite grasped the finesse for it the way I did lightning?”
“What a vivid image you paint,” he said, the roll of his eyes landing on her. It made him notice that the expanse of all of her skin was oddly pallid, like a Crow truly had left her here to collect their payment. But assassins weren’t the only thing that could leave a body draining of its color on the floor.
Heat could too, particularly when paired with humidity like this.
He should have noticed it sooner, in truth, he thought, wanting to clap a hand to his forehead. One of his easiest—and quickest—contracts had been the one where he locked a mage in a Vyrantium steam bath.
Sliding closer to her instead of flagellating himself, Lucanis ran a hand up her leg, fingers dipping into the bend of her knee and the fold of her hip. He continued up over her abdomen, lingering on the underside of her breast.
Despite the heat of the room, large swaths of her skin were clammy to the touch, but the deep creases of her body burned sweat-slicked beneath his palm and fingers as he’d feared. How had he missed how unsettlingly cool and damp she’d been when he’d pressed his face to her in relief?
“Mierda,” he swore.
“Lucanis, I mean it, it’s too hot for this,” she protested, but he continued, running a firm hand over her sternum until his fingers cradled the back of her neck.
“Have you been drinking water?” he asked, ignoring her misunderstanding of his touch. Perhaps he had lost a little of his… more clinical nature with her over the last few months, but he was only interested in determining how much trouble she was really in.
Rook frowned when he brushed fingers over her forehead, and her eyes, which had been cracked open, slid shut, one after the other. He placed the backs of his fingers to her eyelids. They were too warm.
“Some, but more wine than not. There were a lot of meetings today, full of dignitaries in need of plying.” She paused. “I might have had too much because that’s the other reason I’m down here. I feel tipsy. But not in a fun way.”
Lucanis snapped the fan shut and held it out to her. When she didn’t take it, he reached out and forced her hands to take hold of it.
“Hang onto that,” he told her as he got to his feet, his movements swift and precise as his voice dropped into the no-nonsense cadence he mostly reserved for Talon meetings.
That didn’t stop him from muttering at length about Tevinters in Antivan as he strode into the bathroom and ran the tap in the copper tub, ensuring the dwarven rune that heated the water was not active. When he stalked back into the bedroom, he went straight for the wardrobe in which he kept his weapons.
Though his supply of poisons, antidotes, and the like was nowhere near as extensive as the Crows of House de Riva, he did have a few tricks up his sleeve. Plucking two small bottles from the selection, he went back to Rook’s side. Taking her other hand, he wrapped her fingers around them.
“Do not drop these,” he advised her, serious as the grave.
Whatever witty retort she no doubt had was too mumbled for him to understand. Lucanis shook his head, annoyed with himself for letting his guard down for even just a moment while her body was nearly ready to boil her organs. He stripped off his waistcoat and shirt as he did, tossing them on the bed beside the mountain of heavy robes she had discarded.
“Between your finery, the wine, and the conditions here, it is no wonder you are on the floor. You are lucky I found you when I did,” Lucanis informed her once free of the more restrictive clothes—and a little cooler himself— then crouched beside her.
“Lucanis, I’m fine,” she insisted in a voice weaker than he’d ever heard issue from her mouth when he slid his arms beneath her knees and neck, gathering her in his arms.
“No, mi amor, you are not,” he said, grunting his way through the scream of his marble-battered knees as he lifted her. “Another half an hour and this would have been a very different story.”
Rook had no response to that aside from a few slow blinks and grimacing like the sudden movement made her queasy. Though she wasn’t entirely dead weight in his arms—the way she dropped her head onto the meat of his shoulder was far too controlled for that—it was much too close for his liking.
“It’s alright,” Lucanis assured her—or possibly himself, too—as he hastened his steps back across the room. “I’ve got you.”
When he laid her gently on the bathroom floor beside the tub, he took the bottle containing an aquamarine-colored concoction from her fingers. Then he killed the tap, carefully uncorked it, and poured just a drop or two of the ice grenade’s viscous contents into the water. A small puff of frosty air went up, cooling the small room just a little, but the sweat on his back a lot. As he watched the surface of the water ice over, he mused for just a moment that he should have brought more of these things with him on the contract for the gods.
But since there was no time to waste, he slung leg over the side of the tub, and broke up the sheet of ice with a few kicks of the toe of his boot. Turning, he pulled a fair few towels out of the linen cabinet, and tossed them in the tub to soak, then he seized a sizable shard of ice from the slushy water in the tub.
Rook’s head sagged to the side in a way that made him hold his breath a bit too much as he knelt behind her on folded legs, propping her head on his knees. Setting the chunk of ice aside for the moment he took the last, larger vial from her fingers. The astringent scent of elfroot wafted from it when he uncorked it with his thumb, and she stirred weakly at the smell, her brow more creased than ever.
“Are you with me enough to drink?” Lucanis asked her, putting down the ice shard next to him so he could stroke her hair back. Her brow relaxed a tiny bit at the touch of his cold hand to her forehead. “It’s just a restoration potion. The ones I’d give you in combat.”
She paled some more at the thought. “It will make me sick.”
“I have more. If it doesn’t stay down, it’s not a problem. We’ll try again. But you have to drink, mi amor.” But all she did was press her lips together firmly when he nudged them with the rim of the bottle’s opening. A small sigh escaped him. “Demasiado terca.”
Lucanis picked up the chunk of ice he’d correctly suspected he would need and held it to the back of her neck, slipping it beneath her hair. When she gasped reflexively at the contact of such coldness against her burning skin—so hot that warm water already began trickling over his fingers—he tipped some of the bottle’s contents down her throat. Then he waited for a moment to see how much of a mess he’d really be cleaning up in here.
Once she relaxed a bit more into him, Lucanis knew the potion had settled her stomach the moment it hit it. The real evidence was the way she opened her eyes and glared at him upside down. His shoulders released some of the tension they held. That looked a bit more like his Maribel.
Tipping the rest of the potion into her mouth—which she thankfully didn’t fight him about—he put the empty bottle down on the floor with a small clink of glass on marble and stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers.
“I didn’t realize how bad it was,” Rook admitted, a bit sheepish.
“That’s alright. Be glad I know the signs.”
Lucanis brought the ice to her forehead, water trickling down the sides of her face and through her hair. A diluted version of that earlier bliss settled over her face as she reached up with her empty hand to circle her fingers around his wrist.
“I am.”
Brushing a thumb over her cheek, he gently pried her fingers off him and transferred what remained of the ice to her own palm. “You can use that if you like, but I’m not done cooling you.”
Rook nodded her understanding, and allowed him to gently lower her head to the floor once more. Getting back to his feet with that same efficiency of motion, he pulled a towel from the chilled water and wrung it out back into the tub. Turning, he snapped the towel out above her, and she yelped a little at the unexpected shower of tiny droplets of icy water all over her.
“Good,” he observed. “I think we caught it soon enough that this won’t take very long.”
“Praise the Maker, because this floor is not very comfortable.”
Lucanis smiled thinly as he draped the towel over her leg. “I’ll be sure to inform the staff that the marble could be softer.”
Giving him a laugh that meant she’d likely be fine, he went on, molding the wet, cold towel around her leg. Though he kept his touch clinical, he did not miss an inch of her, wrapping it around and pressing it to the curves of her foot like a potter working clay. When he ran firm hands up along her calf and thigh—dipping under her knee and into the crevice of her hip as he had before—he noted the shiver that ran through her, but dismissed it as a physiological reaction to the cold her overheating body so desperately needed.
Repeating the entire process of wringing and molding with her second leg, it was only when he draped the third towel over her torso and ran a steady hand between her legs to ensure even her groin was covered that he noticed her hips begin to move restlessly.
His eyes flicked up to hers as Lucanis ran his hands over the muscle of her lower abdomen and up her sides. He knew the look that met him all too well.
“You cannot be serious,” he uttered, arching an eyebrow.
“Shouldn’t have given me the potion to start if you expected me not to have a reaction to you touching every inch of my body like this.”
That same shiver took her again, which he now realized was more of a shudder of pleasure she appeared to be repressing. Kicking himself internally—because he continued, at times, to be an idiot about her—he stilled her hips with his hands.
“Not now, cariña,” Lucanis said, gentle, but as firm as his hands.
They did not even linger over her breasts in his continued endeavor, or so it was until her nipples hardened beneath his touch rather than the chill of the towel. Though he barely faltered, it was enough for her to catch.
Rook chuckled. “You’re a bad liar.”
“Maribel, with the fright you gave me, I could not get anything going for you right now even if I wanted to,” he told her in no uncertain terms, unable to help the curl of his lip, though he couldn’t have said if it was in irritation or adoration.
But he continued with his endeavor, slinging a knee across her waist, both so she could feel the truth of his words, and so he could smooth the towel across her clavicle and neck.
“I’m fine with just your very clever hands,” she said, wriggling a little under him all the same.
“I am literally draping you in wet blankets.”
“And yet it’s working for me,” Rook shrugged, though the movement was sluggish enough to portray she was not yet entirely back on her feet.
“Por la sangre del hacedor, was that potion expired or are you simply impossible?” he muttered and she giggled.
Before he warmed the towel or gave her ammunition for any thoughts she may have been having, Lucanis got back to his feet and continued on, draping and molding towels over both her arms. Since the ice he had given her was now a puddle beneath her head, he rolled up the last towel after wringing it out, and placed it beneath her neck.
The fan lay useless against the floor with her arm pinned beneath its towel, so he took it from her, then snapped it open as he dropped to one knee beside her, and began the arduous task of fanning her to keep the towels cool.
“How long do you think you’ll need to do that?” she asked, losing her teasing edge as she looked at him propping his spare elbow on his knee and his chin on his fist.
“As long as it takes for your teeth to chatter.”
Lucanis watched carefully as she nodded and closed her eyes, but he could tell she did so with deliberation instead of succumbing to unconsciousness. There was no reason to panic, he told himself.
“Did I really frighten you that much?” Rook asked after a few minutes, in that uncanny way of the only person to have seen the depths of his mind. Her eyes opened and looked at him.
“Yes,” Lucanis answered easily, and she raised her eyebrows at how quickly he gave his answer. “Would you relish finding me on the floor?”
“I suppose not,” she said, having the decency to blush—another good sign. “That’s all though?”
“How are you this perceptive even under duress?” he sighed.
Though Rook’s smile was tired, he could tell she was thinking. “Your parents?”
Lucanis looked at her for a moment, but gave her a curt nod in the end.
“I saw them when Caterina pulled me from the hidden passage in the wall my mother had hidden me in. It was… well. It changed everything. Put me on the path to where I am today.” He paused, his eyes skimming over her, not with the clinical assessment of earlier, but with the hauntedness only capable of a man that had lost too much throughout his life. “Seeing you like that? It was worse, even if it was only for a moment.”
“Maker, Lucanis,” she breathed, shaking her head. “I should have remembered and found some other way to cool off.”
“It is not your fault. Besides, today’s weather has been rough even for us accustomed to it. Though we will need to have a talk about your water intake.”
When she gave him another tired smile in response, he saw it: she had begun to shiver, enough to make her teeth chatter the way he’d wanted. He put the fan down and held his hand to her forehead. Her temperature had stabilized.
“I think we’ve succeeded,” Lucanis informed her as he stood, his abused knee aching badly enough he briefly considered a restoration potion of his own. The marble really was uncomfortable. “I’ll help you with those in a moment.”
Stepping from the room, he retrieved a pitcher of water and one of the glasses the staff ensured was always in their room. When he took them back into the bathroom, he was unsurprised to find that she had wriggled her arms free from the towels.
“You never listen, do you,” he sighed, pouring water into the glass and setting the pitcher at his feet.
Lucanis sat on the floor beside Rook, and gently helped her up into a seated position, her back against his chest for support. He handed her the glass. By some small miracle, she drank without being told.
When he let slip a small sigh of relief as he wrapped his arms loosely around her waist, Spite’s wings emerged from his back, and wrapped around them both. With sudden understanding, he realized his demon had been silent from the moment he’d found her on the floor.
“I think you scared Spite too,” he murmured, resting his head against hers, a bone-deep tiredness settling in the void the draining adrenaline had left behind.
“Sorry,” Rook answered, stretching her fingertips out to brush along the wing within reach. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, Spite shivered, but remained otherwise silent.
So too were he and Rook as they sat there a few moments longer, until she held out the glass of water to him.
“You’re very sweaty.”
Lucanis couldn’t help but laugh as he touched his hand to her head and cradled her just a little closer.
“Si, mi amor, it happens.” He lifted his head and drained the glass, then refilled it and handed it back to her, his fingers lingering over hers. “But perhaps we should spend the night in Minrathous.”