#ship: emmrich x anais

[brightaxe]

UNEARTH — emmrook.

Words: 2738. Characters: Emmrich Volkarin x Rook — Anais Ingellvar. Rating: Teen. Summary: Trying to sleep when injured is a near-impossible thing, but with Emmrich's assistance, Rook finds the comfort she needs to get some rest. AO3 LINK.

Anais shut her eyes as she sank - carefully - down onto her bedroll, favoring one shoulder above the other. Still, she felt the pulled muscle in her chest stretch as she eased herself back. It sent an ache along the length of her collarbone and into her sternum, a warm pain radiating throughout her upper torso. Her breath caught in the quiet of her tent — a strained whisper of surprise.

The group did not spend much time outside of the Lighthouse, not with Solas's extensive network of eluvians close at-hand, but on that night, they had no other choice.

A wrenched arm and a broken bone stopped them in their tracks, kept them from returning home, but luckily, neither she nor Harding had been infected with the Blight during the battle. The same could be said of Emmrich, who'd spent the better part of the afternoon and the beginning of a tumultuous night tending to their scout's leg.

Lace was no longer suffering from her injury, at least, and the gentle hum of Emmrich's caretaking had quieted hours ago, leaving behind only the crackle of a soft-spoken fire and the inobtrusive song of nature as it settled in to sleep, just as they were.

Propped up against her pack and the well-loved pillow she often carried with her, Anais shifted, turning, fussing with her weary limbs in an attempt to find a comfortable position. She sighed, frustrated, but even that made her chest spasm. Even after so many months of training to improve her stamina, the slightest injury felt like the end of something. She was no physical ideal, no honed image of health. She was just a foolish young woman who'd whipped her staff around in a panic and pulled something.

Typical scholar bullsh.it.

How exhausting.

Anais pinched her eyes shut again in hopes of forcing the issue of sleep. Behind her eyelids, she saw the faint glow of the campfire. From her right ear, a muffled and indistinct hum, and from her left, a clearer song, as Arlathan's unstable magic coiled through the air around her. Gooseflesh rose on her arms from both the forest's ancient suffering and her fresher, clearer pain, like a bell in a storm.

There would be no sleeping, then, not without the aid of alcohol or a particularly potent potion.

Instead of reaching for either, she sought out a different method. A tangle of words occurred to her — a broken Nevarran lullaby that she could barely recall. There were spotted beetles' wings, each of them numbering differently, and a child that sought to set them in a row. The lullaby was a maze of a thing, and without remembering the song to the letter, Anais lost herself inside of it.

She was so lost, in fact, that she didn't hear Emmrich clear his voice outside of her tent. So lost that her lack of a response led to him poking his head inside, equal parts curious and worried.

"Anais?"

The woman in question sat suddenly upright — more surprised than cautious — and she let go of a string of curses that she muffled into the cup of her palm. A tremor followed the curve of her spine as she curled over the throb in her chest, but she bit her lip to keep from uttering the pained sound that clawed at her throat.

Healing a broken bone required an incredible amount of magic, and she would not demand more from their professor, not for something that even she would be able to mend if her reservoir of mana hadn't been so depleted by the fight they'd stumbled into that afternoon.

But he would insist.

Even in the shadowed half-dark of her tent, she saw in his eyes that he would insist.

"I… apologize for the profanity, professor," Anais murmured, blinking hot tears onto her lashes rather than her flushed cheeks. She smoothed her hand over her face from her lips to her brows and rubbed the warm skin beneath her bangs. "I was just drifting off."

Emmrich swept away her concerns and her lies with a mere flick of his wrist.

"An impressive feat, considering our surroundings," he offered before glancing around the… intimate interior of her tent. With barely enough room for one and a half grown adults to stretch out comfortably, there was nowhere near enough space to stand for someone quite so lanky. "Our fearless leader really ought to be granted more comfortable lodgings."

Despite the tension in her chest, Anais felt the corners of her mouth twitching into something resembling a smile.

"Do you intend to carry it?"

Emmrich's gaze circled back to hers. His brows rose. "Oh, I couldn't imagine."

Her laugh was a quick little thing, but from the gleam in his eyes, she saw that he hadn't missed it.

"Here, sit to my right."

Anais shifted even as he opened his mouth to stop her, gingerly pivoting her body onto her right side and scooting to give him room enough to sit. She was still getting used to maneuvering around her hearing loss, and the enchanted aid she'd been given once she recovered from her fever did not play nice with the ambient magic that dwelled in Arlathan forest.

She barred her arm over her chest, hoping to stabilize the muscle as she moved and somewhat succeeding. "Before you offer, though," she began as he let himself down onto the far side of her bedroll, grunting under her breath as she shifted her generous hips onto the other, "I will have to decline any offers of healing."

"I —"

"Not until you've rested, at the very least," Anais amended.

Emmrich tutted, but Anais felt herself more charmed than chastened.

"Such interruptions and each of them unnecessary. I came to offer you my healing in the morning," Emmrich explained, "and to see if there was anything you required in the interim."

He drew no attention to it, but Anais saw him lift his chin in a way he never did when speaking to the others, as if he was hoping to pour his words down into her good ear so that his intentions wouldn't be lost to the bad. Something about his unspoken efforts left her feeling even warmer than before. There was no shortage of butterflies teasing the lining of her stomach, either. They were worryingly plentiful.

But she was not so inexperienced with speaking that she couldn't open her mouth without spilling her wanting all over the bedroll between them.

"I cannot think of a single thing, truthfully, save for the pleasure of your company."

Emmrich's eyes widened, if only a little. One day, they would know each others' steps. One day, every compliment and every promise and every smile wouldn't be a surprise. There was a comfort in that, in the guarantee of a… like-minded friendship.

Without his wrists' usual adornments, his movements did not clink or glimmer. He stretched his hands out, long, elegantly tapered fingers spreading, testing them for tremors only to find them gravely still. Even hours of healing was not enough to weaken him. And he wasn't even half as occupied with stamina training as she was.

In another world, at another time, she might have been embarrassed that a man some thirty years her senior was in finer shape than she was, but on that night, she was more inclined to watch him than worry about the state of herself.

She was too tired to complain.

He thumbed over the opposite wrist as a thoughtful expression settled on his face, the digit's tip sliding beneath the stiff wrist of his sleeve. "Were you having some difficulty finding your sleep, then?"

This time, Anais's sigh was implied.

If she didn't want the pain to return with a vengeance, she knew that she couldn't be so generous with her sighs. And she knew that she'd been found out, as well. He knew she hadn't been drifting off, that he hadn't interrupted a moment of her sleep. There was no relaxation to be found alongside pain, not without the intervention of magic or medicine.

Rather than responding with a simple yes, Anais bobbed her head in a nod.

"There may not be much room for us to share," Emmrich said, his voice slow and softly nasal as he settled down at her side, more easily than she had by half, "but if it is company you want in your hour of need, it is company you shall have."

Anais could not stop herself.

Leaning against the butt of her pack, she peered over at him and murmured a quiet, "Not need so much as want."

"In your hour of want, then."

Anais's dark eyes drifted shut, but she did not find the sleep that was so adeptly avoiding her. Instead, she spoke, murmuring a question as their bodies anchored nearer to each other: "How is Lace's leg?"

"The bone is set, and the muscle is in better shape than yours." Emmrich's report was a gentle thing. It lacked in an abundance of detail given the hour, but there was a precision that she appreciated. He always knew how to deliver news. "I planned to return to the Lighthouse in the morning and request Davrin's aid in bringing her back."

Without opening her eyes, Anais asked, "And what of me?"

"I thought you would require a great deal of my attention in the morning, hence my offer, but the pain is almost entirely from inflammation." She felt only a hint of pressure on her collar as his fingertips followed the fire-hot swatch of skin beneath the open collar of her tunic. "But I believe I am more than capable of healing you now."

His skin was soft. His fingertips bore no calluses save for the ones gained from decades of gripping a quill. He smelled of campfire smoke and medicinal balm, of faded sweat and a perfume that barely clung to his clothes.

Anais exhaled slowly.

Only when she took in another breath and her chest pressed flush against Emmrich's touch did she feel a tremble in his hand — the hand that had been so steady mere moments before.

"Emmrich?"

She opened her eyes to find him nearer to her than he had been before. No more than a foot separated their faces. Just enough light crept through the tent's walls to illuminate the sharp planes of his face, though the finer details were lost to shadow. His eyes were on her, though, and his lips were parted. Those two details, she kept circling back to.

His fingertips settled almost weightlessly against her collar. After a hard swallow and a moment of gathered strength, they no longer trembled.

"Yes, Anais?"

"Did you come in here to heal me, or did you come in here to kiss me?"

Both, Emmrich responded without using his words.

A faint golden glow bled from his fingertips into her skin and the wounded muscle underneath it, but the relief that followed was nothing compared to the spike of excitement that shot through her the moment his lips pushed into hers in the half-dark. He sucked in a sharp breath as they made contact, moments before his mouth opened again to kiss eagerly over her upper lip.

Just before the kiss, they had been far enough apart that their bodes only touched at the knees, but the distance was soon remedied as Anais squirmed forward, her pain earlier nothing more than a faded ache. Her thigh slid between his. Her belly tucked against the pliant curve of his skinny body. And her chest pushed flush against his own, with his hand still pinned in between them.

Her teeth brushed against his lip before biting down, and she felt his reaction more than heard it as his hips rocked forward against the soft fat of her hip.

Emmrich's mouth shifted the moment she allowed him his freedom, following the curve of her chin and the broad line of her jaw before demanding another kiss and another kiss and another. The hand pressed between their chests kneaded at the tender flesh above her breast rather than beneath, thumbing against the collar he'd been so intent on touching before sliding farther downward from her chest to her waist.

"Anais."

Hearing her name on his tongue left her breathless, unable to kiss him again as she leaned her forehead against his and sucked in a hungry breath. She held onto his jaw, half-cradling his cheek in her hand, as she struggled to clear the haze that had filled her mind from the healing as much as his mouth.

"Anais," Emmrich whispered to her, his nose brushing against hers as he waited patiently for her to recover. "My intention was to apologize for not tending to you tonight and leaving you languishing in such pain, but it appears… I could not help myself."

The hand poised on her waist slid around to the small of her back, and his fingers curled into her tunic, gripping at her, coaxing her closer. There was no space that remained between them, but that did not stop him from attempting to move nearer to her. And that did not stop her from encouraging it, her hips turning into him and above him as she pressed him back against her pillow.

Long, dark hair hung over her shoulder and pooled across his narrow chest, making it look every bit as if he was drowning in her.

"I could not bear to see you in such a wounded state," Emmrich whispered. He lifted his fingers to the hair that spilled over him, brushing his fingertips through the near-black locks and across the long line of her ear. "Nor could I bear to see you unkissed." A smile touched the corner of his thin lips. "Apparently."

Anais leaned forward, past his hand, and pushed her face against the carefully buttoned collar that laid against his long neck.

When he spoke, she couldn't hear the crackle and pop of the fire. She couldn't feel the strange whisper of elven magic against her skin. As close as she was to him, Emmrich was all there was — his scent, the movement of his chest, the sound of his breathing. Weariness tugged at her shoulders, at her limbs, weighing her down against his chest.

"Oh, darling," he exhaled. He pushed her hair away from her face and gathered it close to his own again. "You must rest."

Anais moved to protest, moved to kiss him again, but found the fingertips of his free hand nestled against her lips, stopping her just short of her goal. His brow pinched sharply upward before he gave a shake of his head.

"I would like nothing more than to indulge the both of us for hours…"

Anais strained forward, her mouth moving in the shape of an ardent, "Please," against his fingers.

"… but we must think of our companion."

Wanting was a selfish thing, but without the pain in her chest, she felt as if she deserved to be selfish, if only a little. But she also knew that Emmrich would not budge once he set down his foot, no matter how much he wanted what she offered, no matter how warm the sound of her voice had made him. And so, she relented.

Not once since meeting Emmrich Volkarin had she considered the path they would take towards each other — that pain would lead to relief would lead to a fire that threatened to turn her belly to ash.

"On one condition," Anais murmured as she settled down by his side. Her cheek found the curve of his shoulder, and she wound an arm across his tapered waist. His fingers wove into her hair before rubbing at the scalp beneath.

"Mm?"

"Talk to me." She buried her nose against him. Her next words were muffled, but making them out wasn't difficult. "Until I fall asleep."

Where she laid her head, Anais could feel his heart hammering in his chest.

Emmrich did not want to sleep any more than she did.

His lips found the top of her head.

And until she fell asleep, he spoke — of a winding Nevarran lullaby, with beetles and their numbered wings and the child who sought to keep them all in line. He took her hand and led her through the maze, and she swore to herself that she would never forget their order.