#EmmRook | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lavenderprose · 3 days ago

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Nanny AU? Nanny AU.

Emmrich was somewhat used to receiving panicked phone calls at work. The nanny situation with Manfred had been tumultuous for quite some time—there had been a year or so there where Manfred had burned through nannies like a fire through kindling. Four professionals had come and gone, and Emmrich had learned that very few things were sacred when one had an overly precocious genius-level three-year-old at home; especially one’s work hours. He’d taken to answering the phone immediately upon feeling it vibrate in his back pocket. Well, as immediately as whatever was living on his gloved hands would allow. He often had to let it go through the voicemail the first time as he divested himself of gloves, but there was almost always an immediate second call.

That was, until Rook.

In the six months since hiring her, Emmrich had only received two phone calls at work. Rook seemed to almost pathologically respect Emmrich’s working hours, and only called during utmost emergencies. The first, only a week into the current arrangement, had been to inform him that Manfred had vomited at school and she needed him to call the school and give them her information so that she could pick him up. The other was an incident involving Johanna the cat, which resulted in Emmrich talking her through the process of dismantling the basement drop ceiling.

Rook’s respect of his work hours was one of the many reasons why Emmrich had come to deeply appreciate her presence in his life—aside from her positive influence on Manfred, of course, and her skill in helping to nurture and educate him. Emmrich had known, of course, that single parenthood was an undertaking not to be taken lightly, and he would certainly never regret the decision to create his little family, but the lack of a partner in the endeavor had rankled at times. Rook had offered insight into what such a partnership might be.

But then, that thought veered too closely to something that Emmrich had spent a great deal of time trying to ignore over the last six months.

In any case, the dropoff in sudden calls had allowed Emmrich to reclaim a piece of his own sense of peace that he hadn’t even realized had gone missing. He’d at least stopped walking into work while wondering what unplanned issues would arise during the day.

On the other hand, he now knew that on the occasions that his phone did ring at work—with Rook’s particular ringtone to indicate to him that it was her calling—it was truly an emergency.

He couldn’t be blamed, therefore, for answering the phone with a hurried and abrupt prompt of, “What’s happened?” when Rook’s ringtone pierced the calm and quiet of his office on a Tuesday afternoon.

“Manfred’s fine,” she said immediately, prompting yet another rush of gratitude from him—she was intuitive that way. The relief flooded back out of his system, however, when Rook followed it up with, “I’m really sorry to bother you, Emmrich, but I think I need to go to the hospital, so you should probably come home.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked, standing immediately to gather his things. On a handful of occasions, he’d been summoned home to take over care if a nanny had some unforeseen event—issues with their own childcare, sudden mid-day illness, and on one occasion an on-the-spot resignation. That had been a memorable and unfortunate day.

A medical emergency was a new and horrifying occurrence.

“Manfred crawled under the hedgerow and I had to chase him through the field behind the house,” Rook said, and there was an odd quality to her voice—stifled, as though with congestion. She’d been experiencing no such ailment this morning at breakfast, when she’d come in from her apartment in the guesthouse and helped him clean up the carnage of Manfred’s oatmeal. She, herself, had smelled of strawberries. Her skirt had fluttered just a little too high as she ran down the driveway to hand him his forgotten travel mug as he ducked into his car.

“Oh dear,” Emmrich tutted, locking his office behind him as he swept into the hallway. He made the split-second decision to simply text Johanna—the person, not the cat—that he’d had a family emergency and would follow up with her about the day’s cases at a later time. Johanna was unlikely to notice his absence, as it was; she was elbows-deep in some unfortunate soul pulled from the Minanter River the previous afternoon and likely wouldn’t surface until she’d gleaned the name of the man’s tax adjuster from the color of his liver.

“And he’s fine,” Rook reiterated, as though she genuinely thought that that was still his major concern after she’d told him that she was intending to seek emergency medical attention for something that Emmrich’s very own three-year-old had subjected her to. “But there was deathroot? Growing in the field? And I’m super allergic. Usually I just break out in hives, but there was so much of it, and I was wearing a sundress, and anyway I’m having trouble breathing—"

“Do you have an epi-pen?”

“No,” Rook said, “Like I said—it’s never been this bad before. I think I might have inhaled some of the pollen.”

“Calm down,” Emmrich said, sinking into his medical training and pushing the alarm to the back of his mind. It had been years since his practice had taken its turn towards the deceased, and he was unused to treating living patients, but the knowledge was still there. He comforted himself with it as he sprinted towards the parking garage, open suit jacket flailing behind him. “There should be Benadryl in the master bedroom ensuite. Chew two capsules, open a window and sit down. If you feel your throat closing or start feeling lightheaded, you need to call emergency. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Okay.” Rook’s voice was faint—less assured than he’d ever heard her.

“You’ll be alright, my dear,” Emmrich said. “Where’s Manfred?”

“I put him in his room with some toys. He’s probably making a mess, but there’s nothing he can hurt himself with and I didn’t trust myself—”

“That’s quite fine, darling. Breathe—slow, deep. You’ll hear the door open in a few minutes. It will be a neighbor coming to take Manfred. I don’t want you to get up. I’ll come find you when I get home.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Rook said, and the fact that this was her token argument showed her state.

“I’ll not let you drive yourself to the hospital in the state you’re in,” Emmrich said firmly. “I’ll be there shortly. Stay calm.”

Rook’s low, mumbled agreement and the tone of the call ending sounded as Emmrich started his car and the phone connected to the sound system. As he peeled backwards out of his assigned parking spot and executed a maneuver of suspect legality to merge summarily onto the roadway, he initiated a second call.

The line picked up immediately, as he suspected it would.

“Myrna,” he said, even before she’d finished her cool, perfunctory Hello? as she answered the phone. “Are you or Vorgoth working from the home office today?”

-0-

“I’m really sorry about all of this, Emmrich.”

For at least the third time since a nurse had led them into this awful little room, Emmrich offered Rook a strained smile and patted her knee. She’d put on leggings before his arrival at the house, probably to cover up the scrapes and bruises from her excursion through the hedgerow and deathroot patch, and his hand met nothing but soft, body-warm cotton. Nonetheless, he kept the touch as perfunctory as possible—a brief, chaste touch to the very apple of her kneecap.

“Don’t apologize, Rook,” he said, shifting restlessly in his plastic chair. Rook was perched in a large vinyl medical recliner, knees drawn up to her chest and face pressed to her own thighs. Her breathing had become slightly less labored in the last hour or so, after he’d arrived at the house to find her sitting on the chaise lounge in the master bedroom reading nook, face ashen and hands fisted into one of his mother’s quilts. He’d nearly tried to convince her to let him carry her to the car.

As her breathing eased, however, she began to itch and the rash worsened—large plaques of urticaria covering a vast swath of her skin. Emmrich kept a careful vigil on the patches, on the color of her lips, looking for any sign of a worsening reaction.

They had her on a pulse oximeter, which was beeping steadily at 74 beats per minute and 99% oxygen saturation—both good signs. A nurse had taken her blood pressure upon their arrival, frowned slightly, and left. Emmrich suspected this to mean that it had been slightly elevated, which was to be expected with the stress of the situation and the antihistamine he’d directed her to take earlier.

They’d been waiting for over an hour for the attending physician.

“I don’t know what’s taking so long,” Rook sighed into her knees, as she itched frantically at a plaque of hives on her shoulder.

“Unfortunately, with your vitals, you’re likely not considered top priority at the moment,” Emmrich murmured.

“I want to go home,” Rook muttered, a tone of abject misery to her voice, and Emmrich wanted nothing more than to fulfill her desire. Take her home, put her to bed and offer her something warm and comforting to drink.

He made himself veer away from those thoughts when he realized that it was his own bed he was imagining tucking her into.

A wholly inappropriate thought to have about one’s live-in nanny, said a voice in the back of his head, which unfortunately sounded too much like Johanna for comfort. You decrepit old popinjay, it added as though to confirm.

Emmrich indulged in a sigh of his own, buried his face in the heel of his hand, and said, “A little longer, darling.” When he realized what he’d said—and he’d used that word earlier as well, hadn’t he?—he looked back up in time to catch an odd, soft expression cross Rook’s face.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wearily. “Habit.”

“I like it,” she whispered. She looked very small, sad and…young sitting there, wrapped around herself in a tense bundle.

Before Emmrich could say or do anything, the curtain of the triage room slid aside. This, of course, was for the best.

“Sigrid?” said the man who’d just arrived—the attending physician, by all indications, given he was wearing the darker blue scrubs that this hospital used to indicate such a role, and Emmrich in fact recognized him as one of the ER physicians he’d had encounters with in his role as medical examiner.

“Yes,” said Rook, though it took Emmrich a moment to remember that yes, that actually was her legal name. The one she never used and seemed averse to anyone else using, either. To evidence this, she added, “Though, I go by Rook—it should be in my paperwork as my preferred—”

“Oh, it does say that,” said the physician, tugging a rolling chair several unnecessary feet across the cramped room. He mounted it backwards and tapped his clipboard. “Sorry, I’m still getting used to this whole preferred name thing. Us old dogs have to learn a few new tricks, I suppose. So you’re Rook, she/her pronouns, and who’ve you brought with you today?” He looked to Emmrich, furrowed his brows, and said, “Oh, Doctor Volkarin. I almost didn’t recognize you out of the morgue.”

Emmrich offered a brief, wane smile. “Doctor Reldevar.”

“So you must be Mrs. Volkarin,” said Reldevar immediately, holding out a hand for Rook to shake.

Oddly, Rook didn’t deny it—she shook Reldevar’s hand, though unsmiling, and offered Emmrich a brief shrug when the good doctor looked back down at his clipboard.

“Oh, sorry, stuck my foot in my mouth again,” Reldevar said, still examining the clipboard, “You kept your maiden name, huh? Lots of women doing that these days. Anyway, Rook, it looks like you’re in today about some breathing trouble?”

“An allergic reaction to deathweed, it would seem,” Emmrich said, taking the burden of speaking away from her—which she offered him a small, grateful smile for behind her knees. “Poor Rook is very allergic, and crawled through a patch this afternoon after Manfred—that is, my son—ran off into the field behind our house. I believe she inhaled some of the pollen and received quite considerable topical exposure. She was badly scraped by the thorns. I directed her to take an antihistamine to stop the worst of the initial reaction, but steroids will probably be necessary to prevent another, worse recurrence of the reaction due to the extent of exposure.”

Reldevar hummed, pursed his lips, flipped through the pages of Rook’s paperwork for a further moment, then snapped his fingers and pointed in Emmrich’s direction. “Your husband’s got it in one, Rook. We’ll fix you up with a steroid injection here in the hospital and we’ll watch you for a little bit to make sure the reaction is going down, and then we’ll send you home with…eh, probably a prednisone prescription and a topical ointment for those hives. How’s that sound?”

“Um, fine?” said Rook, still itching, and Reldevar presented her with his hand to shake again.

“Sounds good,” he said, and leaned over to shake Emmrich’s hand as well. “Take care, Doctor.” He winked. “Take the missus home and give her a day away from the kid, huh? Sounds like he’s a handful.”

Emmrich responded with nothing but a strained smile, and Reldevar took his leave back out the curtain of the triage room.

As the curtain was still swinging, Rook took in a deep breath and said, “I just felt like it was harder to explain the situation—”

“Of course,” Emmrich said, wiggling his hands equivocally in front of himself. “That’s entirely—”

“—and I thought, maybe he’d listen to me if he thought—”

“Oh, absolutely.”

They fell into an odd, awkward silence of the sort that they’d never really had to suffer through. Rook was almost universally easy to talk to, at least so far as Emmrich was concerned, and conversation had always flowed easily between them—whether it had to do with Manfred, various professional conversations that had to take place due to Emmrich’s position as Rook’s employer and de facto landlord, or conversations of a more personal nature.

Rook settled back into the recliner, looking small and tired, and Emmrich could do nothing but reach over to pat her knee again.

It took another half an hour for a nurse to arrive with the promised steroid injection.

“So this needs to go into a large muscle,” said the nurse. “We usually do the muscle in one of your glutes—meaning this area here—” the nurse gestured to her own rear, somewhere in the area where thigh became butt. “If that’s alright with you, I just need you to lift your dress and pull your leggings to the side.”

Rook sighed, but showed no significant reluctance to the idea—even despite Emmrich’s continued presence. He knew, obviously, that this was his cue to excuse himself or at least look away, but he was trapped by some sort of car-crash impulse. It happened very quickly, and he couldn’t quite make himself look away; Rook rose from her chair, pulled her sundress up around her waist and lowered her leggings just far enough to reveal the buttery expanse of one smooth thigh and asscheek. She was clearly wearing very scant undergarments. The only real indication that she was wearing panties at all was the barest peek of a dark purple thong cresting the apple of her hip.

“This might sting a little more than your average flu shot,” the nurse cautioned as she swiped an alcohol wipe onto Rook’s flank. “It’ll ache a bit tomorrow. But once we’re done, you can go home, so that’s good…”

Emmrich became aware of just how hard he’d been clenching his jaw when Rook gasped at the prick of the syringe and his mouth, quite involuntarily, fell open just slightly. He could feel his pulse in his teeth. His legs, crossed over each other in a habitual mannerism, ached from how tensely he was holding himself. Between them, his traitorous prick stirred, intrigued by a breathless sound from a beautiful woman and the sight of her nearly bare ass.

“Oh, shit, you weren’t kidding,” Rook said, fingers visibly whitening on the armrest of the chair she’d bent herself over. “That hurts. Oh, Maker, that fucking burns—”

“Sorry,” the nurse said, genuine sympathy in her voice as she capped the syringe. She dropped it into a nearby sharps container and fastened a piece of gauze over the pinprick of blood now welling up on Rook’s otherwise pristine skin. Emmrich floundered for his own self-control. “Good news is, you’re done! The doctor already sent your prescription over to your pharmacy on file. Your discharge papers are on the table here. Any questions?”

“Oh, I live with a doctor.” Rook tossed her head in Emmrich’s direction, seemed to almost wink. “He’ll take care of me, and I just really want to go home.”

“Medical examiner,” Emmrich said, perhaps a little louder than he’d meant to. Rook had yet to pull her leggings back up all the way—the purple thong abided, teasing him from underneath the hiked-up hem of her dress. “I do have—technically, yes, I’m a medical doctor—"

“Fair enough,” said the nurse, in what was perhaps the politest way possible to say I do not have time for this. To Rook, she added, “Feel better!” and then took her leave to the tune of the curtain rings rattling on the rod and the swish of scrubs.

“Your leggings, my dear,” Emmrich said into the subsequent silence—or, at least, the lack of conversation; the rooms around them were still full of sound. Beeping heart monitors, coughing patients and the tapping of shoes on tile.

“Oh,” said Rook, who in that very moment seemed to remember that her entire hip and most of her right asscheek were uncovered. She pulled them up, wincing at the drag over her recently abused flesh, and sighed into her palm. “Take me home, please?”

“Yes,” Emmrich murmured. “I can certainly do that.”

-0-

Upon walking through the door, Johanna immediately made her discontent at the hour of their arrival known. It was indeed quite significantly past her typical dinnertime, and she was a creature of habit—but Emmrich still considered the unrepentant yowling a bit excessive.

“Oh, hush,” he admonished her, ushering Rook in the door with a hand at the small of her back. She’d deteriorated rapidly on the car ride home—visibly tiring and becoming distressed and impatient with the persistent itching of her skin. She was bright red in places, including her shoulders and arms, and her normally pinned hair had come down in large drapes against her face and the back of her neck. At some point, Emmrich had offered her a discarded cardigan from the backseat, and she now wore it draped around her shoulders. It was gray, a little lumpy, and inspired an incongruous urge of possessiveness to curl itself around Emmrich’s heart every time he glanced at her.

“Rook,” he began as he turned on the foyer light, “It would comfort me greatly if you stayed in the guest room tonight, instead of returning to your flat in the guest house. It’s entirely up to you, of course, but it would ease my mind if—”

“Believe me, Emmrich, the last thing I want to do right now is walk all the way to the guest house,” Rook sighed. Hearteningly, she pulled his cardigan tighter around herself. “I’ll make up the bedroom for myself.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Emmrich said, in almost the tone he used to admonish Manfred when he indulged his more mischievous impulses. “I’ll make up the bedroom and run you a bath. It would be a good idea to remove any remaining material from your skin before you sleep.”

“Emmrich, I can’t let you—” Rook sighed, grunted, and attempted to reach her hand down the back of her shirt to, presumably, scratch at a patch of urticaria on an inaccessible portion of her back. “You’re my—I can’t put you out like that—”

“Nonsense,” Emmrich replied, determined to make that the end of the conversation. He mounted the stairs rapidly, using his superior height to his advantage for once, and he’d already begun filling the guest bathroom tub with nearly-scalding water by the time he saw Rook make her way into the bedroom through the cracked door.

Of the bedrooms in his house, one of them was the master—which featured a full ensuite bathroom with whirlpool tub and generously-sized rainfall shower stall. Manfred’s bedroom was attached Jack-and-Jill style to Emmrich's office via a childproofed bath that featured a toilet with a potty seat installed, child-height vanity and a shower bath strewn with all manner of toys. The fourth bedroom was smallest and therefore had the smallest bathroom—a simple three-quarters bath with only a tub, though it was claw-footed and generous in size. Emmrich knelt on the plush rug and ran the bath, peering through the cracked door and attempting to convince himself not to.

It was unlikely Rook wasn’t aware of his presence in the bathroom—she could hear the water running, and would almost certainly know that he hadn’t left it to run unattended, if only through habit given the current absence of three-year-olds on the premises. Even so, as she was meandering through the room and passing in and out of view, she was shedding clothes.

First the cardigan, which bared the angry rash on her arms and shoulders. Then the shoes and the leggings—when she next wandered by, Emmrich realized that she had scraped her knees up quite badly, likely while pursuing Manfred under the hedgerow. She stood center in the room for a moment (Emmrich drew a hand through the pooling water in the tub and, upon realizing it was scalding hot, switched the faucet to cool for a moment) and pulled the pins out of her hair. Disappeared. When she next came back into view—

Well, the dress had gone, and he discovered that the thong and bra set had a pattern of skulls.

Emmrich finally convinced his eyes downwards. He was unsurprised but nonetheless mortified to find the telltale swell of an erection evident against his inner thigh. He sighed and rubbed some of the cool water across his forehead.

If this woman was a test from the Maker—or something even more esoteric; a challenge to his vows as a physician perhaps? A sudden hurdle for his self-control and dedication to gentlemanliness to overcome?—she was certainly serving her purpose masterfully.

“Emmrich?”

She’d found a robe—fluffy and white, something he’d put in the closet long ago that might have been left behind when a lover made an unceremonious exit from his life. He’d laundered it regularly for years on the off chance that it would find use again, by a paramour or a guest. Emmrich was utterly unsure which of those labels Rook fell under, especially in the moment.

She seemed to almost know what she’d done—he would certainly not go so far as to say the parade in front of the bathroom door had been intentional, but she at least seemed not to care if he’d been watching. She at least seemed content with the idea that he knew the color of her underwear and the shape of the tattoo on her hip.

It was, interestingly, a black bird. A rook, if he wasn’t mistaken.

“Yes?” Emmrich responded, with an only slightly-too-long pause as she stood in the bathroom doorway and he attempted to make his tongue form sounds.

“Do you have any of that oatmeal bath left from when Manfred had HFMD?”

“Oh! I very well may.” Grateful for a reason to flee and collect himself, Emmrich did so. The colloidal oatmeal was in the back of the cabinet in Manfred’s bathroom—half a box left over from Manfred’s recent bout of Hand, Food and Mouth Disease. A disgusting five days of Emmrich’s life which he was not eager to relive.

Manfred’s fingernails were still regrowing.

Luckily, the thought of weeping blisters did wonders for the exorcism of blood from certain areas of the body. When Emmrich returned to the bathroom, his erection had flagged, and he was able to finish running the bath with all of the professional courtesy demanded of his Hippocratic oath and the employee-employer relationship he held with the attractive and berobed woman sitting on the toilet lid.

“Test the water temperature before you get in,” Emmrich cautioned as he turned off the spigot. “I’m afraid I may have run it too hot to start.”

He’d expected Rook to simply agree, or wait until he’d exited the bathroom, or at least simply use her hand to test it. To his incredulity, she immediately slunk over, pulled the hem of the robe above her knee and dipped a toe in.

The color of her nail polish matched her underwear. He did not know why—or perhaps he was just lying to himself—but it was this particular detail that brought his cock instantly, painfully back to full hardness.

He could not stop himself from imagining those toes in his mouth.

“I think I will also start my nighttime ablutions,” he said, perhaps hoarsely—he could not bring himself to care in the moment.

“Sure,” Rook said vaguely, watching the oatmeal swirl in the tub. “Thanks, Emmrich. Oh—would you help me put the ointment on after this? There are places on my back that I can’t reach.”

“Of course,” Emmrich said, feeling like his head would pop off his shoulders.

He put as many doors between himself and Rook as he possibly could. The guest bathroom, the guest room, his own bedroom door and then the door to his own ensuite. He spent a moment against the back of the bathroom door, eyes squeezed shut, talking himself off the edge.

“Oh, fuck it,” he hissed, and tore into his trousers with the furiousness of a man possessed. He stumbled to the shower, removing clothes as he went, and almost stumbled into the shower stall with his socks still on. The cold water did absolutely nothing to soothe his hot skin or boiling blood—as he slid down onto his knees and tilted his head back under the rainfall of the showerhead, he was already stroking himself with a franticness more typically seen in those half his age.

Maker, she made him feel half his age. When she pranced through his kitchen wearing a sundress and a smile. When she poked her head into his study at night to tell him that she’d read his son to sleep, asked him how his day had gone, sat on the settee and talked to him for an hour. When she let him call her darling and pretended to be his wife.

Oh, it was almost too easy to imagine it. To pretend.

He stripped his cock, pictured her hand. Her mouth. Her small breasts in their purple skull-and-lace vesture. The way he would worship her with his hands and mouth. How did she taste, how did she sound, what was the color of her—

He gasped, fingers curled into the tile of the shower floor, and came into the lukewarm water swirling around his knees.

The shame kicked in almost immediately, even as he watched the evidence of his depravity vanish down the drain. He was a man in his fifties, a father, a doctor. This sort of behavior was so completely below him, so completely inappropriate—

But damn, had it felt good. The last three years, since the blessing of Manfred came into his life, he’d allowed himself to become almost completely divorced from his own sexuality. It had been over a year since he’d had sex, and even masturbation had seemed like too much effort most nights. When he did work up the energy to reach a hand down, he did so while conditioning his hair and making lists in his head.

The relief of a true release was almost as stark as the accompanying self-loathing.

Later, as he carefully rubbed the ointment onto Rook’s back and pointedly did not let himself look beyond the patches of rash he was focusing on, he mumbled, “I want you to know, Rook, that I…value you.”

Rook turned, hair pooled over her shoulder. She was not embarrassed of the fact that her shirt was hanging loosely off her neck, and he could not avoid seeing the peak of one brown nipple.

“I know,” she said, and Emmrich could almost convince himself that she was simply tired, or trusted him as a medical professional, or did not even consider that he might look based simply on his age.

Almost—were it not for the small, satisfied smirk he saw in the vanity mirror as she turned back around.

#emmrich volkarin #Emmrook #DATV #Dragon Age #I don't know if I'll do more of this but I want to. I've got to refine the plot tho.#Rook is tired and mad about the deathroot and she thinks that dick from a beautiful 52 year old man would fix her.#Nevermind if that beautiful 52 year old man is her boss.#She can be Manfred's new mom.#Emmrich. Make her Manfred's new mom.

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