this is all of me for all the world to see; 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

And then, before she knew it, he was there again.

She was wrapped in him, submerged in his presence, his mouth on her shoulder, his name on her tongue. She closed her eyes and leaned into him, releasing whatever grasp she had on doubts and fears. She forgot why she had been telling him no, why she had held herself apart when this was so natural and so right. A low hum built at the base of her throat and then swelled in her chest, low and musical and full of fog.

“Dovev,” his name slipped off a drunk tongue as she curled her head into him, pressing her forehead first into the warmth of his thin neck. Then, she pulled back just enough for her mouth to find his jaw, tracing the edges of it as she had the first encounters, when everything had been so sweet and simple.

Except that wasn’t quite true, was it? Nothing between them had been simple. It had always been complex; it had been wildfires erupting across her flesh, hurricanes billowing into her chest. It had been the power and the majesty of a natural disaster from the very start. And this? This was nothing different.

His sweet tending to her wounds stung but eased the pain and stirred something else in her. Without her prompting, without thought, her own healing unraveled and sprung to life, the tiny threads of it reacting to his touch. Her wound began to close beneath his prompting, the flesh beginning to heal, the edges of it reaching for one another. With each touch, it continued, slow and steady like the waves upon the shore.

“Dovev,” she answered his warning with a submission of her own, uncaring about the darkness in his mouth; she had never cared about the edges to him, the way they pierced her flesh, the way the closer she leaned into him, the more her palms were singed. Her breathing grew slower as the pain eased in her shoulder, more steady, as she turned to him, as her mouth traveled across his jaw, skimming over the edges of the bone armor. “Dovev,” deeper this time, truths splitting apart there, honest spilling forth.

In some deep part of her mind, she knew she should stop—knew she should pull back.

But suddenly, with him there, she couldn’t.

And so she did the only thing she could: she lost herself in the flames.

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