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shivunin · 6 months

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In the Quiet Dark

Zevran/Arianwen Tabris | 1,633 Words | M | CW: Mild/implied sexual content

I originally started writing this to go with this piece I commissioned from pinayelf (thank you again!) but I did not finish it in time to post them together. It may be a little late, but here they are in all their messy, sharp glory c:

Zevran sat on the other side of the campfire from Arianwen.

She knew this without looking, just as she had known approximately where he was all day. It had been a traveling day, uneventful, and they’d made their way through the Brecilian’s outskirts with little trouble. This annoyed her almost as much as her new awareness of Zevran did, for she would have dearly loved the distraction of a fight.

Instead, she…itched.

Nowhere in particular. Under her skin, perhaps; she did not know. She knew only that she had gone a very long time untouched and uncaring and now she could feel every inch of her skin where he was presently not in contact with it. There had been some barrier, perhaps, some veneer that had kept her from noticing such things. Now, she could not stop feeling the precise distance between them. Every scuff of his boots grated against her skin, every laugh felt pressed directly into her eardrums, and whenever she caught his eyes—

“Are you alright?” Alistair murmured next to her. Tabris dropped her fork, grimacing, and set the plate aside. It clattered in indignation against a loose rock and fell silent sooner than she would have liked.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’ve been scraping your fork against the plate there for minutes on end. Just thought I’d—don’t give me that look! I’m only asking.”

Arianwen stopped glaring at him and glared at the fire instead, which was a poor replacement for looking across it at Zevran.

All sorts of people lay together all the time and still the world went on turning. It was nothing; ought to be nothing important. She certainly shouldn’t feel any different than she had when she’d woken up yesterday. Wen ran sharp nails over her forearm, but it made little difference; this wasn’t that sort of itch.

“Ugh,” she said, slinging her leg over the other side of the log and walking away without any more farewell than that. She didn’t have the words; had left them all behind in Zevran’s tent the night before, it would seem.

Her own tent was dark and cool, a welcome contrast to the fire outside. When the flap of fabric fell closed behind her, Wen pulled the tie loose from her braid and combed the plait to loose waves with harsh fingers. Disarming took some time, her knife belt set less neatly in its place than usual, the knives in her boots cast aside with an equal lack of care. Her armor fell into a dark corner readily enough when she was done. She retrieved her final dagger from it the moment before it thudded against the bottom of her tent. Wen tucked the scabbard into her waistband and loosened the ties of her tunic, as if doing so would help her breathe more easily.

She had just cleared her plate, but she was hungry. She needed to run, to climb, to fight. She wanted blood, the thrill of battle, wanted to bite into—

“Warden?’

Wen hissed between her teeth before she could stop herself, the exhale of relief whistling and sharp instead of the soft thing she supposed it ought to be.

“You seemed as if you may want company,” Zevran said, his voice low. “Do you?”

“Yes,” she said, short and clipped.

Firelight painted her tent with fingers of gold and red when he ducked inside, but when the fabric fell again the two of them were left in near-complete darkness.

Touch me, she thought, and leave. Her hands flexed until they ached, then curled into fists at her sides.

“Why did you come?” she asked him.

The words felt almost detached from her, for they were nowhere near the things she wanted to say instead.

A pause. She could almost feel him weighing his answer.

“Because,” he said at last, the words very slow, “I wanted to.”

She didn’t see him move, but she felt his callused fingertips when they trailed along her forearm. For a moment, she thought she might cry out at even so little contact. All day, she had been thinking of this and now—it was like an itch. She had been scratching at the absence of him all day and now she had finally dug her nails in deep enough to find relief, but too deeply for it not to hurt a little.

Arianwen pressed her hand over his, deepening the contact and stopping the gentle motion at once.

“Then stay,” she said.

When she breathed in, the air was sharp and too much. She wanted; she wanted far more than was safe. Knowing that she could have this almost made it worse—because who was she, to want to be touched? Who was she, that she couldn’t stand knowing she’d already forgotten the way his bare skin felt under her hands, the precise texture of his hair—who was she? She did not know.

A stranger, she thought.

“If you’d like,” she finished, because even now she would not say please, and he laughed somewhere before her in the dark.

“Yes, I think I would,” Zevran said. When he touched her hair, he was gentler with it than she’d been, the touch a caress instead of a rebuke.

“I have never seen it loose before,” he murmured.

His breath skimmed her cheek–too close. Not close enough.

“You still haven’t.”

“I did for a moment—in the light,” he told her. Wen let go of his other hand and he found her jaw with it instead. His palms were warm and rough and perfect. She vowed never to tell him so and pressed her cheek against his hand instead.

“How lovely you are, mi vida,” he went on.

His lips pressed against her ear, moving so slightly that she almost didn’t feel it at all. Wen reached between them and found the leather tie in his own hair. It came loose with little effort, but the tug it took to free his braids seemed somehow momentous. She had half-undressed him last night, but she had been too distracted then to think of doing this. It felt…intimate, somehow, as Zevran seeing her hair unbound had felt intimate.

“More,” she said, and he laughed again.

When he answered her, he murmured directly into her ear.

“More flattery? I am sure that I can think of a few such things to say, my dearest Warden, but I did not think you were the t—”

“No,” she said, impatient. When she turned them both and tripped him onto her bedroll, he fell so easily that he must have done so on purpose. Arianwen did not care. She cared only that she could finally feel him pressed against her at last. A relief, though it was relief that did not lessen the need at all.

“More,” she told him again, and caught his laughter on her tongue when she pressed her mouth to his. Zevran felt just as good as she remembered—better, perhaps, because she had already begun to doubt her own memory. He moved with her whenever she shifted, tilting his head when she angled hers, tucking his fingers beneath her collar when her fingers trailed across his cheekbone.

“Impatient,” he murmured when she abandoned his mouth in favor of his neck, his voice low and breathless. Wen grunted in response and nipped at the warm skin there. His pulse thrummed against her mouth, frantic as her own heartbeat and twice as precious. She traced the skin with her tongue when she was finished, soothing the small hurt she’d set against his skin.

“Perhaps I am impatient, too,” he said. She did not know how he had grown so skilled at kissing her in the dark when he had only a night’s practice at it. She hovered on a dagger’s edge, much as she had the night before; unlike the night before, she knew she would not run from this. When it was almost too much to bear, she twisted a lock of his hair between her fingers and found herself anchored again.

Zevran’s hand slipped lower, lower down her back. The knife she’d tucked behind her shifted slightly.

“You should be more careful,” he said between kisses. “Leaving your blades where anybody can find them. Someone dangerous could take it, yes?”

Wen nudged his nose with hers, searching in the dark for what little she could see of his face. The faint light flashed in his eyes, there and gone in a heartbeat.

“But not you,” she said.

After a moment, he squeezed her hip. His hand slid away from the knife, tracing the length of her spine instead.

“Not me, no,” he agreed. She could feel his voice now as much as she had felt him not touching her earlier. She wanted his words and wanted them to stop in equal measure, but silence was the easy choice. It had always been kinder to her.

Wen leaned forward to kiss him again. If she shut her eyes very tightly, she could feel his body wherever it touched hers, could focus more completely on his hair wrapped around her fingers, on his fingernails where they dragged lightly against the base of her skull.

If she had left them open, she might have seen the way he looked at her all the while—might have known that he watched her as intently as she had not watched him before.

In fact—she did not think of her dagger at all.

But this was not something she was ready to see. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut as tight as they could go.

Zevran rolled her onto her back several minutes later, the motion as natural and obvious as the moon rising somewhere outside her tent. When he set her dagger to the side, Arianwen neither lifted it from the blanket nor drew it from its sheath.

#zevwarden #zevran arainai #arianwen tabris #warden tabris #da fic #shivunin scrivening #zevwen #okay!!! this is the first of three as my little private celebration of a kudo milestone #but i fear the other two will have to wait for tomorrow! c:#feelings are always so intense to wen that it is a pleasure and a challenge to write her #(but more the former than the latter!)

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