leliana

[leliana]

I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well
no harvest of green but it's still my heart to sell

His concern, his anger, washed over her, but she didn’t mind it. She simply leaned into him, thankful to have him to help hold her. She had pushed herself too far; she knew that. Her gift whimpered in her chest, completely spent, and she admonished herself for attempting to overexert herself, for thinking that she could control the fates and weave new tapestries into destiny. However, she knew, she knew that she never really had a choice. Not when it came to him. Her gift would recover. She would recover.

And he would live. That is what was most important.

At his lecturing, she just gave him a kind smile, amber eyes tired but lit lightly for him. “You mean, ‘Don’t do it again please.’” Her laugh was thin but it rang like silver bells in her mouth at the teasing as she reached over to pull gently on his forelock, mouth trailing sweetly down his cheek and then under his chin. “Stop trying to get yourself killed and I will stop putting you back together again.”

The truth was, that for all of Leliana’s softness and quiet nature, there was steel beneath it. She may not be loud or bright or intense, but there was an understated strength, an unwavering core. She would bleed out for Dovev, and she would follow him, and she would not place demands on him--but she would also not blindly listen when he commanded her. It wasn’t in her nature. Not in her DNA.

“It’s my gift, Dovev. I will save whoever I want, whenever I need to.”

She breathed in his scent, felt the rush of his pulse, and she smiled, her own desire, foreign as it was to her, simmering just below the surface, trapped beneath the fog of her exhaustion. Part of her wanted to ask why he was always on the brink of death when she found him, why the wounds did not seem to come just from the bone armor erupting from beneath the surface, but she also had a feeling that he didn’t want to explain that to her, not yet. He may press into her, touch her, hold her, but there were still critical parts of him that he kept locked away from her; she knew he wasn’t ready to share them.

At his words, her heart lept into her throat, and she closed her eyes against the shocking power of it, against the need that clawed at her. He wanted her. Like he had wanted her in the cave, the heat of it, the desire. Like he wanted others, she reminded herself. Not like she wanted him; not the way that she was coming to need him. She opened her eyes to study his face and lied to herself. It would be enough, to be wanted by him in this way. She could make it be enough. He didn’t have to share his heart.

(Lies. All lies. She hungered for that part of him, that part that felt so impossibly out of reach.)

“I am yours,” she repeated, whispering the words into his neck.

“I have been from the first moment we met.”

I put everything I had into something that didn't grow
like going on a wild hunt, shooting arrows without a bow