now all our memories, they're haunted; vulgaris

[leliana]

Leliana

She doesn’t need to speak.

Of course she doesn’t need to speak.

He understands the shifts of her body, the soft fluttering of her breath, the gentle spike of her pulse in the delicate slope of her neck. He reads her completely, unfolding the edges of each and every page and laying them out before him. She presses into his side and closes her eyes on a sigh, breathing in the musky scent of him—that masculine edge of spice and earth and copper. He always smelled of danger. Of the entire world and yet completely of home and her stomach twists with an undying love.

If only he knew the way she loved him, of the way her heart fell apart and reformed in his hands.

Of the power he wielded.

She doesn't have the words to explain it to him, but he doesn’t require it. The language between them, learned over the last year, is something more, and she communicates in the only way she knows how. Her wings turn scaled and serpentine, oil-slick in the way of their new family. She feels the fang against her flesh and she doesn’t shy but only murmurs her consent, affirms her pleasure in the moment. She has nothing to fear from him, nothing to keep from him that is not his already, and she doesn’t try.

The moment is as beautiful as the last, the two of them fitted together so perfectly, but there is a different depth this time. Before, it had been the fresh exploration of a land not yet explored. Love me for tonight, he had pleaded, and she had known—even then—that she would love him for so much longer. So, this time, it is more. It is familiar, bodies retracing the same steps, picking up the same dance.

But it is no less thrilling, no less beautiful for the familiarity.

Warmth blooms in her chest, her bones igniting with something that he beckons forth.

When it is done, her mahogany body is darker, her legs weak, and although exhaustion creeps the edges of her mind, all she can feel is the dull static of joy. She blindly finds his chest again, curling into him, her lips tracing mindless patterns into the places she can reach. “Vulgaris,” she breathes, her voice syrupy on her tongue, thick with emotion. “You asked me once to love you for the night,” she remembers the first time, surrounded by the roar of the river. “I hope you do not mind if I choose to love you forever.”

but there you go again, turning golden, right there in front of me

@[vulgaris]