Chapter Text
Even stoned out of his mind, Rook picks his way across the fallen tree bridge without the slightest wobble, as sure and light-footed as any Dalish elf. Laughing, he shouts after Assan, who squawks and bounds off into the bushes with a loud crash.
“Only the juicy ones!” Rook calls, teetering now that he’s back on solid ground, “I don’t want any of your wrinkly little worms!”
Davrin steps off the tree bridge behind him, not bothering to hide his smile as he shakes his head in amazement. One sip of gingerwort tea, and the stick’s fallen straight out of Rook’s ass. He’ll have to ask Emmrich for the recipe.
Rook spins around to face him, grinning so widely that Davrin can’t help but return it.
“I am… a griffon whisperer,” Rook whispers loudly, blue eyes wide. His pupils are pinpricks. “I understand them now.”
“Sure you do, griffon man,” Davrin replies, throwing an arm out and catching Rook across the chest before he can totter back to the cliff edge. He folds Rook into his chest, and Rook goes easily, stumbling with another laugh to bury his face in the crook of Davrin’s neck.
Davrin lets himself enjoy it, just a little. When he’s not higher than an old-school aravel, Rook’s not big on physical affection. Or laughing. Or smiling. He’d sooner be carving his way through darkspawn than be caught dead hugging, let alone cuddling. To be fair, that’s what had drawn Davrin to him in the first place. Rook got shit done, no beating around the bush, and everyone knew there’d been little enough of that coming out of Weisshaupt in recent years.
Rook wraps his arms around Davrin’s waist. “You need a shower,” he says cheerfully, “You smell.”
Davrin rolls his eyes and reaches back to pry Rook’s hands off of him but only succeeds in inching himself towards death by suffocation when Rook tightens his grip with a plaintive protest.
“Come on, let go,” Davrin says. He manages to take one step forward before Rook digs his heels in, dragging them to a stop. “Rook,” Davrin insists.
“You’re so warm,” Rook mumbles. He leans up and nips the corner of Davrin’s jaw. His hands wander south.
Davrin’s pretty sure some ancient relic’s going to home in and explode them into tiny pieces purely out of spite if they start dry humping out here, so he stoically orders his cock to stop whatever the hell it’s doing and barks, “Rook, let go.”
Rook’s death grip slackens, and his hands land fully on Davrin’s ass.
“Mmmm,” Rook hums, groping him enthusiastically.
On instinct, Davrin looks over his shoulder. There’s just a cliff there. A cliff. Trees. Sky. They’re in Arlathan. What was he expecting? An entourage of Senior Wardens? Still, he flushes, and he seizes Rook’s wrists and forcefully peels him away.
“Oookay, time to get you home,” Davrin mutters.
Rook whines in protest, and the sound goes straight to Davrin’s cock. Rook doesn’t whine. Rook commands. Rook demands. He’d shown up at Davrin’s door late one night, ushered Assan outside, and slammed the door shut before casually beginning to remove his clothes.
“The eye-fucking’s getting a little distracting, so why don’t we just skip to the real thing and get it over with?” he’d said.
So they’d fucked—that night, and almost every night they’ve happened to spend in the same place since. They’re both Wardens on borrowed time, especially now with Weisshaupt gone and this blight to end all blights raging across all of Thedas. It simplifies a lot of things.
Rook squirms in his grasp again. He’s small, even for an elf, but Davrin’s seen him take down hurlocks solo on a regular basis and figures he’s probably just pretending to be caught. Even as he thinks that, Rook looks up at him through his wild fringe of sandy hair, and that’s all the warning Davrin gets before he’s tackled to the ground.
He crashes onto his back in an oddly springy patch of dewy grass. His pack takes the brunt of the fall, but he’s still a little dazed when Rook clambers onto him, hands pressed to his shoulders keeping him down. The gingerwort tea definitely hasn’t done anything to his kissing, which is as painfully full of teeth as it usually is, the sounds that slip between them swollen with want.
“Gingerwort tea may have some magical properties,” his memory of Emmrich says primly in the back of his mind.
Magical properties, his ass. It’s a fucking aphrodisiac, is what it is. He’s going to kill that old meddling sack of bones when they get back.
“Rook, stop,” Davrin growls. He shoves Rook off him with brute force, flipping him onto his side and wrenching both of his arms behind his back. Struggling to catch his breath, head and cock both all sorts of confused, Davrin drops his forehead to Rook’s shoulder. Fuck’s sake. Why the fuck is this happening. Why here? Why now?
“Davrin, I need to–” Rook pleads, gasping for breath.
“You’re stoned way out of your mind right now,” Davrin grits out.
Slippery as a fish, Rook wriggles a foot free and drives it beneath himself, bucking his hips and nearly dislodging Davrin before he kicks Rook’s foot back out and pins him flat on his stomach.
“I need you to fuck me,” Rook begs, face pressed to the trampled grass, “Please, Davrin.”
“What kind of monster do you think I am?” Davrin retorts, now cursing Emmrich and every mage who’s ever drawn breath. He’s never touching gingerwort again. Assan can eat yams for the rest of his life. “Settle down. I don’t want to have to knock you out.”
“Davrin,” Rook pleads. There are actual tears in his eyes. “Please. I want to. I really want to. We’ve been fucking for ages. Why wouldn’t I want you now?”
Because the Rook he knows only ever bends over for him when all the candles are out, and it is dark, and there is little to be seen, and too much to be felt.
“We’re in the middle of Arlathan on the top of a fucking cliff!” Davrin explodes so he doesn’t say what he’s actually thinking.
You don’t actually want me.
Their arrangement is casual. No strings attached. He knows Rook still makes the rounds among the Wardens in Lavendel, where his reputation for recklessness is shaded with many layers of meaning. Davrin can’t blame him, has no real claim to him, even if jealousy rears its ugly head every time Rook slips away from their campfire on his own.
Rook’s an elf in every way that he is not. Rook is pretty and small, with smooth skin and disproportionately long legs that meet in a pert ass. Rook has very little body hair, even around his cock and balls, which are so small they hardly tent his briefs. Rook has both the appetite and the stamina of a Grey Warden, and he fucks like one too, rough and hard, racing to the finish. Rook is, in short, a walking fantasy, and his blunt propositions are rarely, if ever, denied.
But Davrin also knows that Rook fucks in complete silence, no desperate pleas, no whispered endearments, not even a single, quiet gasp. He doesn’t like being touched and rarely even gets hard. If he comes, which is rarer still, it is mostly dry, and it tightens him up so much that the night almost always ends there. He’s skittish in the aftermath, on his feet and reaching for his clothes while the evidence of someone else’s pleasure still slides hot down his legs.
It would be confusing, concerning, even, if Davrin let himself stop to think about it. He doesn’t, though, refusing to get drawn into anything more than the purely physical. He can’t afford that. Rook can’t afford that. All of Thedas can’t afford that. Besides, he’s an elf, too, and even though he grew up free and Dalish, it doesn’t take a lot of guesswork to figure what life’s been like for a grown Tevinter elf without vallaslin who looks like that.
So he doesn’t chase. He lets Rook come to him whenever Rook wants, and he tries to pretend that he’s still as free as he was the day he left his clan behind—and not obviously, eagerly snared in a trap of his own making.
He’s failing miserably at perpetuating this delusion now as Rook rocks back against him, grinding his firm ass against Davrin’s crotch with loud, gasping breaths while simultaneously rubbing himself off on the ground. It would be so easy to pretend that Rook actually wants him, that this isn’t just the gingerwort talking. His cock sure believes it.
“Davrin,” Rook begs, squirming in his arms, “If you’re not going to fuck me, just let me jerk off. Please.”
“Fuck’s sake, we’re in the middle of Arlathan,” Davrin bites out, “Can’t you wait until we get somewhere safe?”
“No!”
Rook’s a wild, sweaty mess, thrashing like a blighted wyvern in its death throes. He sounds like he’s in agony. He probably is. Davrin’s seen aphrodisiacs at work before, and it’s nothing like Bellara’s collection of smuttier serials. He’s heard from other Wardens in the wilds that potent enough concoctions can actually kill, that some victims will work themselves into such a frenzy that their hearts give out, or they start trying to fuck everything in sight and throw themselves out a window or something in the process.
He needs to get Rook out of here. Preferably back to Emmrich, who’d better have some sort of antidote. If he doesn’t, he’s going to be getting griffon shit dumped in his glassware for the next year.
“Davrin, please, please, please, pleasepleasepleaseplease–”
Rook isn’t even going to make it to the eluvian, let alone through the Crossroads. Rook would also probably actually, literally rather die than let anyone see him like this. Desperate. Needy.
Davrin’s cock is hard. He knows Rook can feel it from the way he keeps trying to get his knees beneath him. How many times have they fucked like that—Rook on all fours with his ass in the air, Davrin driving into him from behind?
Rook’s always been practical, pragmatic to the point of callousness. That’s all Davrin is to him. A safe, reliable fuck when it’s needed—and it’s obviously needed now. But he can’t. He won’t. Not like this.
One sip. One fucking sip.
“If you hate me after this, that’s on you,” Davrin grunts.
He wedges a foot beneath Rook’s ankle and flips him roughly onto his back, pinning him firmly down by the chest before reaching for his belt. Rook whines and bucks his hips, burning hands scrabbling up and down Davrin’s chest.
“Lie still, damn it, I’m trying to help,” Davrin hisses, catching Rook’s hands and forcing them up over his head.
Stretched and splayed, Rook’s eyes are glazed and his lips bitten red and swollen. His shirt’s already ridden halfway up his chest from his frantic efforts, the sharp ridge of prominent ribs heaving and contracting with every labored breath. When Davrin finally fumbles his pants open, he sobs in relief, one bright tear glistening gold as it runs down his face. He’s hard, cock springing pink and swollen from between the jut of his hips. It’s such a rare sight that Davrin has to force himself to look away.
“There,” he grunts, shoving Rook’s hands down to his cock, “Go for it.”
Rook legs sprawl open, and he starts jerking himself off with frantic, animalistic need. Davrin turns away, standing and putting himself between Rook and the cliff. Andruil’s tits, they’re completely exposed out here, five feet from the cliff’s edge, twenty feet or more from the treeline. What was he thinking? He could have at least dragged Rook into the bushes.
The dry chafing of Rook’s efforts makes Davrin’s cock ache in sympathy, and out of the corner of his eye, he sees Rook start thrusting up into his own hand. The sounds he’s making are completely obscene, little wet mewling pleas and trembling, shuddering sighs.
“Davrin,” Rook gasps.
Davrin ignores him, keeping close watch on their surrounds for intruders. He’d prefer Venatori. Those, he can just kill. He has no idea how he’s going to explain what’s happening behind him to a Veil Jumper.
“Davrin, I can’t–” Rook groans.
Rook’s said his name more in the past five minutes than he has in the past five days. Davrin adjusts himself in his pants, trying half-heartedly to will his hard-on away.
“Davrin–” a flailing foot catches his ankle, “Please. I need–I can’t– please–”
Davrin turns and finds that Rook’s pulled his pants down past his knees, and he has one hand around his cock, the other buried two fingers deep in his ass. He fucks himself raw, and as Davrin watches, he adds a third finger. The rim of his hole is pink already, clinging to his white-knuckled fingers with every push and pull.
“It’s not enough,” Rook wheezes, shoving another finger into himself. The hand on his cock is wet, and from the way he’s shaking, it looks like he’s already come at least once. “Davrin,” he pleads again.
He’s a mess. A fucking mess. Is this what he looks like when they fuck? Is this what he’s been hiding in the darkness all this time?
Rook twists to look up at him, sweaty hair plastered to his forehead,
“Davrin,” he begs, “I need you.” Davrin can’t speak. It feels so real. “Please,” Rook whispers.
Almost against his will, Davrin sinks to his knees. Seeing this, Rook turns back onto his front, face pressed to the grass, ass in the air.
They can fuck once, just to get the edge off, and then maybe Rook will be able to make it back without dying or humping everything in sight to pieces. Just once. It’s the practical thing to do.
Davrin shrugs his pack off and pulls himself out of his pants, trying not to stutter on a sigh of relief. He watches Rook fuck himself open while he roots around in his pack for the lube he’d optimistically brought on this little overnight trip that was definitely not his attempt at a date. They’d used it last night, of course, fucking in the dark of their tent like animals until Assan had started crying to be let back in. It wasn’t the first time he’d been blue-ballsed by a baby griffon, but trying to literally just sleep with Rook in the aftermath had been a new kind of torture. As a result, he’s been somewhere between kind of horny and embarrassingly desperate all night and morning, but this really isn’t the way he’d thought he’d be taking care of it.
But Rook needs him. Maybe not in the way that he’d like Rook to need him, but it’s close enough, though. Just enough.
Rook comes with a sudden gasp, cock twitching between his fingers. A few mostly clear strings of cum drip onto the grass. Davrin pauses, but Rook does not, both hands still working both cock and hole with clumsy desperation. He’s going to rub himself raw at this rate. Davrin pulls Rook’s hand firmly away from his ass and coats it in enough of the cheap, unscented oil he picks up from Treviso to drip onto the grass.
“Davrin,” Rook whines.
“You’ll thank me later,” Davrin mutters, releasing Rook’s hand, grabbing his other from his feebly twitching cock, and slathering that up too.
Davrin enters him gingerly, holding Rook tight to keep him from impaling himself in one go and tearing his ass wide open. He’s so much smaller that Davrin can circle his entire waist with both hands, and he does so, pinning Rook to the ground as his cockhead breaches the tight ring of Rook’s ass. Davrin bites back a curse; Rook’s still twitching from his last orgasm, ass fluttering and clenching in the aftermath. He’s also incredibly, painfully tight.
Davrin forces himself to go slowly, even more slowly than he usually does, Rook fighting him every inch of the way. When he finally bottoms out, Rook sags back against his hips and groans.
“You okay?” Davrin asks instinctively. He’s said some pretty stupid shit before in his life, but this beats them all by a country mile.
“No,” Rook moans, stomach quivering beneath Davrin’s hands. “Fucking move!”
Well, there’s the Rook he knows.
Davrin starts rocking into him slowly, and maybe Rook’s done a good job of fingering himself open, or maybe he’s still kind of loose from last night, but the painful tightness in his ass eases after just a few strokes, welcoming Davrin in with a familiar frisson of heat.
The sun is warm on his shoulders as he fucks Rook on a clifftop clearing in Arlathan. He feels exposed in more ways than one, on his knees in the wilds with his pants twisted down below his ass, no longer able to deny the lust roaring in his ears. The slick sound of Rook jerking himself off is quickly swallowed by his wild, breathless cries as he shoves himself back to meet every one of Davrin’s ragged thrusts, tender grass torn up by its roots beneath his scrabbling hands.
It would be so easy to think that Rook wants this. That Rook wants him. That their fucking goes deeper than convenience, deeper than lust, deeper than a single sip of cursed tea. It’s the spectre of the hope that’s haunted him, hunted him, stalked him through the trees of Arlathan into the Fade and beyond. Here, it’s pinned him down, just as surely as he’s pinned Rook, and here, it closes in.
Davrin yields.
Rook passes out around noon, and Davrin carries him into the shade of a stand of birch trees before collapsing beside him in a sweaty heap. He really needs to get them back to the Lighthouse. He also really needs to find Assan, who’s never taken this long to hunt for worms, ever. At the moment, however, he hardly has enough left in him to do his pants back up. Flat on his back, he stares up at the sunlight filtering cheerfully through the canopy, viscerally aware of Rook’s soft breath against the back of his hand.
Even when they’re out in the field, even after they fuck, they never sleep together. Always separate tents, separate bedrolls, separate beds. Last night had been a first, Rook curled up just an arm’s length away, and it’s just the latest development in this downward slide that’s made it so easy, so dangerously easy to pretend that Rook’s been coming to him a little more often, lingering a little longer, speaking a little softer.
Davrin pulls away to sit up. The ground spins beneath him, and he bends double to place his head in his hands. He feels like he’s going to vomit, and he’d like to blame that on the sun or dehydration or any other reason beside the fact that he’s long since fallen hopelessly for the man he just fucked senseless in the middle of Arlathan Forest.
His painfully oversensitive cock rasps against the seam of his pants as he turns to look back down at Rook, and he clenches his jaw against the resulting, overwhelming surge of guilt. Rook stirs a little but doesn’t wake, and Davrin averts his eyes from the vivid red imprint of his hands around Rook’s waist. Sprawled on his back, Rook is small and defenseless, bird-boned limbs lax and unyielding when Davrin crawls over with a cloth and starts cleaning him up.
He’d come several times himself even without the fucking gingerwort tea; he has no idea about Rook, but the evidence of both their pleasure is obvious between Rook’s legs, smeared down the backs of his thighs and all around his cock and balls, which lie pink and shrunken again within their nest of wisping hair. Rook’s hole is an angry, gaping red, but to Davrin’s relief, he doesn’t find any blood, and he tosses the cloth aside to be burned.
Not long after he’s found Rook a clean shirt from his own pack, Rook stirs again.
“Davrin,” he whispers.
Davrin freezes. He doesn’t quite consider bolting, but he does entertain the idea of leaving Rook to wake up and figure things out on his own. That’s still a coward’s way out, though, and he scoots back a safe distance when Rook turns onto his side, a searching hand groping the warm grass where he’d been sitting just a moment earlier.
“Davrin?” Rook croaks, sounding much more awake and infinitely more confused.
“Hey,” Davrin replies, “How’re you feeling?”
Rook’s eyes crack open. “What happened?” he mumbles.
Davrin steels himself. “The gingerwort tea was an aphrodisiac,” he replies, “We fucked. A lot.”
“Oh.”
Rook remains where he is for a long moment, slowly blinking his eyes open. He sits up carefully and immediately grimaces, leaning his weight heavily to the side. Davrin swallows, mouth dry.
Rook seems unwilling—or unable—to speak, and Davrin has no idea what the hell to say, so the silence stretches thin between them.
“I’m sorry,” Davrin tries, “I know it doesn’t change anything.”
“It’s no different from what we usually do,” Rook replies flatly,
Despite his tone, he’s shaking, Davrin realizes, fine tremors running the full length of the arm he’s using to prop himself up on one hip.
“Yes, it was,” Davrin insists, words like ash in his mouth, “It’s different. You weren’t yourself. You couldn’t have told me to stop, and I took advantage of that.”
“What if I didn’t want you to stop?” Rook snaps.
The sudden shift in tone makes Davrin’s head spin. “You couldn’t have known what you wanted,” he protests.
“You don’t know that,” Rook retorts.
“I know you, Rook,” Davrin says, frustration rising, “That–”
“–do you really?” Rook interrupts, “I’m just someone you fuck when you feel like it.”
His voice cuts like glass, and Davrin recoils, face hot. Rook’s shoulders slump. Davrin’s shirt is enormous on him, and the neck of it slips down below his collarbone. Rook looks down at himself, flat and expressionless in that way he gets when he’s trying to hide something.
“Rook–” Davrin begins.
Rook heaves himself to his hands and knees, trembling with effort. He immediately lists to the side, only narrowly catching himself on a clumsy hand.
“Will you just–” Davrin says, flinching forward and grabbing Rook by the arn, “–wait? Please. Take it slow. We’re alone out here.”
He hadn’t meant to sound so suggestive, but Rook doesn’t respond. He also doesn’t pull away. Hands and knees splayed, there’s nothing erotic at all about his posture now, and he leans heavily into Davrin’s hand, head bowed and eyed clenched shut.
“Let me get you some water,” Davrin says.
“I’m fine,” Rook croaks.
“Bullshit,” Davrin replies, rooting around in his pack with his free hand. He finds his canteen by feel and unscrews the cap. Rook’s tremors have become a whole-body affair now, and Davrin tightens his grip. “Sit,” he orders.
“Can’t,” Rook grits out.
Davrin swallows back another swell of bitter nausea. “Lie down, then,” he says.
Rook’s arm tenses in his hand, but he makes no move to comply until Davrin, furious with everything about this situation, bodily presses him back down to the ground. Rook crumples with little resistance, and Davrin cradles Rook’s head in his hand, catching him as he falls.
Rook collapses onto his side, knees pressed together, arms lying limply on the grass before him. His head lands in Davrin’s lap, tangled hair spread across his face. For a second, Davrin wonders if he’s passed out again, but when he checks Rook’s breathing, he knows it’s too controlled for him to be anything but awake.
Davrin knows he should move. It’s an unforgivably intimate position in which they’ve found themselves, but Rook remains where he is, head on Davrin’s knee, and doesn’t speak. Davrin’s hand is trapped beneath his cheek, his thumb resting in the slight dip beneath Rook’s jaw. Rook’s pulse beats against the thin skin on the inside of his wrist, slowly, slowly slowing.
Arlathan exhales around them, and Rook draws a deep, shuddering breath.
“I’m glad it was you,” he whispers.