arcaneadvisor | ooc: inbox/plot with me

"The Fade?" It's been ten years and she remembers it, though her own experience wasn't nearly so shattering as those her companions had to deal with; she is glad none of the rest of them knew then how far the demon had to reach to convince her, a Mage that actually kept her wits about her. "You have been there before, you awoke, as did we all." What was different this time, she asks with the way she tilts her head same as all the ravens in the rookery, eyes keen and bright, brows pulled together. "Who is we? How many? Tis a long journey even from Val Royeaux to the Approach, longer still to Skyhold. There was no word."

And that's when Morrigan flies. There was no word, she thought the Nightingale had made a cut and is that so wrong an assumption for her to make? But she does manage half a smile, at least moving around the desk with one hand braced on it to keep herself upright, just to be safe.

"Perhaps the rumours whispered in Celene's court are not so false, there is much I know that does not come from the Circle, and I have learned much more since last we parted." Maybe it's the wrong moment to tease, to try to be coy as if she were years younger but here they are, and one of them should make the attempt. If Leliana is being foolish, then perhaps now is the moment to take Zevran's advice. "I am not afraid of dangerous things, no matter how sharp they might be, not with my mouth nor my tongue."

Morrigan is just as liable to cut herself with her own words as she is another, either what she says or does not, when she says them or when she holds them back so they sit in her throat to choke her.

"Yet here you are," she agrees, and the hand that isn't on the edge of the table reaches for Leliana, slowly enough that she can recoil should she chose to. "I have missed our talks. I am driven to distraction with you here, by this, but tis so much worse when you are gone."

"Can we..." Leliana trails off, shaking her head. "We can talk about the Fade later." There is a certainty in her voice that doesn't entirely match the questioning in her gaze, the request that it carries rather than an instruction. "It was horrifying," is something she does allow, after a pause, allowing Morrigan something, at least. "We couldn't use our crystals."

I tried is arguably something she should volunteer, but does not, and there is a part of her that dreads she will latch onto the chance to talk about something that isn't them, that nebulous, invasive thing.

Morrigan coming to meet her around the desk is a relief, simply put, but it is also terrifying. The teasing is terrifying, the lightness with which it seems Morrigan can approach this, and Leliana looks up sharply with the comment about sharp things, even as her fingers lightly brush against Morrigan's (so much as a hand can brush another when it is gloved, but even so.) It seems an odd contrast to words that compare Leliana to a brandished knife, and yet both things are irrefutable true, real.

I am driven to distraction, says she. Leliana's eyes slip shut, her breath a single slow shudder as she leans forward to rest her forehead against Morrigan's. She feels undone, uncertain how to proceed, and there are few things she hates more than that, even as something in this admission feels like a relief.

"You were no longer of this world, of course you could not." That's more to herself, because it makes sense, because it's the Fade and every rule they think they know goes out the window there, and after the talks she's had - or the most recent one when the ghosts crowded so close to Leliana she could almost hear them - she nods, a murmur of assent following without more words.

Morrigan is a mage, and her own horrors...her own horrors she can imagine so easily now, because she plans for them constantly and has to worry about them when she burned bridges she is carefully repairing now. Kieran, always always Kieran. And Flemeth. She cannot imagine what Leliana has seen, what must sit so heavily upon her shoulders now.

When she was younger she could be coy and could joke about a hundred terrible things, she could be cruel but longed for someone to be able to hold her gently in their hands even if the strangeness of it seemed absurd. If so much of her had balked at ever allowing herself to be stripped so bare and vulnerable before anyone that they might hurt her so easily. There's so little with Leliana though that isn't laid bare to the bone that there's a freedom that comes with it, that allows her to smile, to curl her fingers enough that the other woman can move away should she wish it (she would never wish to trap, to turn her hands to claws unless her whole shape is twisting, she remembers too well how it feels to be on the receiving end.)

"Leliana," she murmurs, in her low roughened voice, daring to pull her closer, wanting to tug the hood down to brush her hair behind her ear but she settles instead for a hand on her side, calming her as one calms any skittish wild thing. The irony isn't lost on her. "Come here, I am going nowhere." I will not flee, she means. And I have lived this long through a world with as many shadows and ugly biting things nipping at my heels.

For once, Leliana obeys, though the movement is only slight at first - a step forward, leaning into the contact, before she thinks better of it. Her hands anchor behind Morrigan's thighs and she hitches her up, lifting with the intention of setting Morrigan sitting on the desk. It's both forward and strangely not, a slow and cautious thing done as she watches Morrigan to try and guage her reaction. It is a bid to steady them both, to let her lean her weight against Morrigan without the risk of pulling them both down, and it feels like--

It feels like a relief to lean against someone without exerting some fashion of control over it. More truthfully, doing anything without holding herself back and maintaining an uprightness befitting a marionette with the string from its head pulled tight is foreign and she shifts with some strange mix of discomfort and curiousity. She can't quite decide if she wants to refamiliarise herself with this or not, how to do it if she does, because doing something because a part demanded it was different to doing it herself.

She feels as though she is holding herself over a precipice rather than simply leaning against Morrigan, but maybe that is the cost of being so heavily armoured. She is better prepared for a precipice than for intimacy, and there is a quiet breath that is not a laugh but certainly isn't anything else as she pulls down her hood and lets her mouth graze against Morrigan's jaw.

"I feel like I should think of something clever to say," Leliana murmurs, a little wryly. "Very clever or very romantic."

And she can't think of a single thing. Typical.

Breath catching in her throat, she still manages a laugh, surprised to be certain, and not quite delighted but definitely pleased. Sometimes it's easy to forget (or not easy, this is Morrigan, she collects everything in the same way that crows and magpies collect interesting shiny things, so perhaps she was simply more comfortable with forgetting) that Leliana is so strong. No one has ever done this and it's the newness of it coupled with that sense of finally that softens her smile.

She isn't one with romantic notions who will come out and say that yes, her spiteful words ten years ago were to hide some hidden feelings. But time has changed her, softened her, and she has never been here before, not once. She wants to be. And perhaps strangely there is no one else she would trust with this than Leliana.

(Morrigan is sure she must know somewhere. In that way that they share messy mirrored parts that overlap imperfectly. Morrigan is utterly her own creature for better or worse for the first time in her life.)

For the first time since their dance she sees Leliana as Leliana. One hand strokes through her hair because she can, because it lets her steady herself enough to think when Leliana is stealing her wits once again.

"I think you and I have said more than enough to one another," Morrigan replies because it's Morrigan, and she does so like to get the last word when she can. "Let me offer an alternative."

Only Morrigan would say all that before leaning forward for a kiss, but a Witch of the Wilds still has a reputation to maintain.

This is not what she came here for. Leliana could not truthfully say what she had come here for, but it wasn't this. It wasn't affection. Some visceral, desperate need to see Morrigan and confirm that she was solid and real and well might have been part of it; this giving way had not. Without intending to she leans into the contact of Morrigan's stroking her hair, and perhaps that is part of what makes this so inevitable and appealing, in its own way. With Morrigan she is a shade more impulsive, more real, like some part of her is prompted by the proximity to someone who pushed and barbed her so long ago. Old fascinations overriding her newer severity, even if the severity has been several years worn in.

Morrigan speaks, because Morrigan is incapable of not getting the last word in, and Leliana exhales something that could have been a near-silent laugh if Morrigan's mouth were not meeting hers. It seems so strangely chaste, and so much more real for Leliana not feeling as though her fingertips and lips were buzzing and numbing from brandy. After pressing her hand to Morrigan's lower back just for half a moment, steadying, Leliana pulls both her hands away to start pulling away the gloves and bracers. That is a secondary focus, though, and as such takes longer than it might, purely because Leliana is more interested in pressing a lingering kiss to the corner of Morrigan's mouth, to her jaw and to her chin before her lips graze upward and she hangs in the breath between kisses, savouring or inviting or daring, and maybe all of those things woven together with a thread of trepidation. Morrigan has always reminded her of storms, the way her magic smells when it gather and seems to linger on her skin after casting, and she is not entirely certain she is not simply caught in the eye of a storm now as she slowly presses the bare palm of her hand to the exposed skin of Morrigan's lower back.

Months ago - and that it has been months still catches her by surprise sometimes, that near half a year has come and gone since she joined the Inquisition, since her and Leliana's lives joined once again - she explained the Fade to a new arrival. The nature of it. Leliana does not need the lesson in the same way but Morrigan has spent so long wondering at how she came to be this way that she will hold her close for as long as she is allowed, because whatever Leliana might throw at her, has she not been through worse? The silence, the possibility of rejection and appearing foolish? That was the terror. It smacked of failure.

Or maybe it felt like fleeing. They're good at being cruel, and that first remark set them on this path where neither could back down without giving ground, without starting to tally victories and defeats.

She wanted this in the eluvian, if she is honest. They were so close there too when Morrigan felt her skin thrumming with the magic. The dungeon isn't a regret but this feels more real, and those are Leliana's hands marked by the bow; it shouldn't affect her but Morrigan is always so bare by choice and all she sees is Leliana's face, ever cast in shadows by that damned hood. Morrigan is always the wild thing, the thing to be chased even as she arches into Leliana's touch with a gasp, eyes half-lidded. Leliana is control as one would expect of a bard and an archer who must pick her shots and breath so carefully, who must focus, but then there is someone with faith and passion beneath all that, someone with fire and a spark. She finds one of Leliana's hands, runs her fingers across her palm to the wrist and allows her magic to flicker over her pulse, almost close enough to kiss but not quite, lips brushing Leliana's as she smirks.

Her breath catches; not with Morrigan's gasp, no, although that has her watching intently, gaze sharp as she studies Morrigan's face and commits the reaction to memory with the looming risk that this may be the only time she sees it. What does make her breath catch is Morrigan's hand finding hers, the pleasing presumption of another hand brushing against her own and the flicker of magic that makes her look down with surprise.

Her own skin is warm, but very pale. The freckled she sported in the Fifth Blight are less visible now, hidden away from a lack of sun, and she is so used to contact being something risky, forbidden, that Leliana turns her wrist over with quiet wonder. It is not a slow action, even if it feels that wa to her. Her fingers catch Morrigan's, weaving them together, before she looks back to Morrigan, her dark lips and her smirk and those golden eyes that seemed to always watch so intently.

It feels-- good. It feels comforting, the kind of warmth unfurling in her chest that has been absent so long as to feel unfamiliar.

Leliana's throat feels very dry, her breath a little less steady, and she pulls Morrigan closer (presses her against the cool of Leliana's chainmail) as she finally kisses her, lips parting and skin flushed and warm.

If Morrigan has her way, because she is greedy and hoards bright glittering things such as every trinket Jonas ever pressed into her hands with some shrug, some story, or simply because he'd vexed her and realised the error of his ways, she wants more of this. More of Leliana unguarded, willingly so. Yes, she does like to catch people unawares in the same way a wolf or a hawk enjoys catching prey by surprise, but it means more, like this. Like an offering.

She wants Leliana out of her armour, she thinks, to walk her fingers up her arm with ice at the tips to see how much she shivers, if she'll fight the gasp, if she'll try to keep still, how long she'll manage to hold her composure. She hopes she'll laugh. If she slides them over her ribs then up, if she warms the palms suddenly in something that would be an apology if it wasn't her.

Thoughts for another time because now there is this, there is so much wanting in her that it makes her ache, and yes she's afraid because when isn't she afraid when it comes to things she wants? When so much of her life was spent being denied, when she must look over her shoulder but Leliana understands that so well, and Leliana would never abuse that. There's a sound of complaint that she almost manages, smothered by the kiss because the chainmail is cold and her skin is aflame, flushed all the way down her throat, and goosebumps break out because well, she wears very little.

When the kiss ends, or rather several later, because she is reluctant to part to breathe, so she kisses Leliana again, because she can and she revels in it the way she does her magic, she still manages to sound a little put out. "You might remove the armour next time, tis very cold." The shiver is entirely ridiculous but then are they not prone to that?

(Twas cold in the dungeon, and cold in her rooms all alone after that and all the nights after Leliana.)

Leliana laughs, quiet and short lived but startlingly real, not the near silent breaths of amusment she allows herself or a false construction for the Game, but an actual laugh.

It feels very strange, and she is silent in the wake of it, bringing the warmth of her hands to slide over Morrigan's waist and rest against her abdomen, Leliana holding herself just fractionally apart to spare Morrigan further chill.

"Forgive my sense of urgency," she finally replies, lips moving against Morrigan's cheekbone, a whisper a intimacy not yet indulged. There is too much wanting, she suspects, on her part, and she is very aware that Morrigan said next time and that it granted her a flare of hope and of longing that she is sure she'll burn herself on.

"Morrigan." An exhale, as her thumbs idly map the plane of skin and Leliana resists the urge to slide her hands upward.

"Urgency? Is that what you call it? It certainly took long enough." She cups Leliana's face in her hand, wondering what it was that she saw in the Fade or the Approach that finally tipped her far enough to finally come here. But they have agreed not to speak of it, and Morrigan can push the questions down for later, because she's too wary of this too-fragile thing held in her hands at the moment, the pair of them positioned utterly ridiculously, yet she wouldn't trade any of it.

(Not even the hurts, if she is brutally honest, and Morrigan is not good at many sorts of honesty other than that or shading it with various lies of omission where she holds back the whole truth until it suits her.)

Her stomach tightens; she's ticklish, and there are silver lines where Leliana's fingers are, stretchmarks from Kieran that Leliana won't have the way Leliana carries scars where Morrigan does not.

"Though...a part of me did not entirely dare to hope. I might have worn my gown had I had warning."

"Urgency is a relative term," she concedes, drawing back just enough to catch Morrigan's gaze, eyebrow a little quirked. It is... strange and pleasant and has anxiety balling together in her cut, the threat of having something vulnerable and making herself vulnerable with that same thing. Part of her wonders if this is too foolish even with prompting and needling and concerns from people who did not know the lay and the truth of it. Perhaps it is possible still to backtrack and to pretend none of this had come to pass.

She already knows that she does not want to, and that is condemning enough.

"Teasing is unkind." Quiet and utterly unaffected by this apparent cruelty, as if she is making the observation for the sake of someone else who might be devastated by Morrigan's wit and as if she had not come in here wielding her words and her tone with some viciousness of their own. "And the dress is not very discrete, hm?"

Which skirts an Issue, and Leliana glances down, idly (deliberately) trails a finger along one of those silvery scars.

Only Zevran knows that Morrigan even has a life that extends beyond Kieran, her work, and varying attempts at friendship, at least coming from Morrigan's own lips. And Zevran again shares something of the same fractured life, and was thus the only person who could be approached for advice without compromising herself or Leliana. Everyone else was too much of a stranger, or Alistair. (If there is one who must surely be worse at this than her, let it be him, let her always have that to hold above his head even if the jests are friendlier these days when they play at spirited re-enactments of the Battle of Denerim where Alistair shows more passion for winning than even Kieran does.)

"I could be worse," both of them know that, but she is smiling, teasing again though she is too old to truly be coy. It's just them. "I am the wicked witch of the Wilds after all, such is my nature, you were never put off. Not even when dressing me in your mind to all those around us."

Unlike then though, tis not most disturbing now. Tis most welcome. Only she has to stifle a gasp and a laugh at that touch, the way her body shudders. No, no she is not ticklish, that would be absurd.

"Less discrete or more unkind?"

Quiet and forgettable, she thinks, as questions go. Especially forgettable, she thinks, in the wake of that not at all ticklish reaction, which has her looking at Morrigan with quirked brow and a little twinge at the corner of her mouth.

"Morrigan."

Her name sounds awfully akin to, what was that? while her fingers trail all the more lightly up Morrigan's sides and over her ribs.

There are words that die in her throat, caught in a gasp that's half-laughter as she tries to fight the instinct to hold perfectly still because Leliana will never forget this, she can feel it in her waters as she starts to squirm away, body curling in on itself. Her jaw clenches. She is a Witch of the Wilds. A daughter of Flemeth. The Scornful Sorceress. Arcane Advisor to Empress Celene.

She will not be reduced to this state--

"Whatever you believe," her voice is steady, it is resolute and unwavering, "you are most assuredly wrong."

Don't you dare. Even as her body tightens in anticipation.

There would be a certain amount of satisfaction in ignoring Morrigan's warning. There is even a brief moment when her fingertips ghost over Morrigan's skin, Leliana leaning closer.

The particular quest is abandoned. Leliana, instead, keeps all her touches light - agonisingly so, because after the Fade she wants certainty and solidity and warmth. Her lips are the suggestion of a kiss, of its immediate possibility, against the point where neck and jaw meet; her hands slip, still feather light, until could anchor at Morrigan's hips if she let them. Whether it is teasing or playing a game born in ticklishness or simply an open invitation for Morrigan to accept rather than having tp refuse, she doesn't know. If it is the latter she hardly knows what the invitation is for.

"Am I mistaken in thinking you and I have begun something?"

An... entanglement, an involvement, a more than before.

There will come a day when Morrigan will get her out of that armour, locking and warding a door behind them so she can make her pay for each and every moment of this until they are both gasping. For the moment she is shaking again - she is a novice at this, there has been only that night with Alistair, a night she doesn't think of because he did it to save the his life, a friend's life, and the life of a man he hated, and she did it to gain something she never thought she would love. Nothing prepared her for this. That it is so sweet, so tender, that Leliana who said such things in the eluvian and fears what her hands have touched? It makes it all the sweeter and she would capture this moment forever if she could.

"You are not mistaken in this," she clarifies because of course Leliana would be maddening in this. "Tis most unexpected. But never unwelcome, believe me when I say that: never once is this unwelcome."

This is her heart laid bare, cut neatly in two and pressed into Leliana's palms when she gives herself to each and every touch. A different person, perhaps a better person (a simpler one, a foolish one, a kinder, gentler one who has not seen or felt the teeth that the world has) would wish them to have felt less pain but Morrigan is realistic. Their pain makes them who they are, and perhaps there are times when she has wished and will again but they are who they are, and it has shaped them into this.

"Never doubt that," she repeats, and kisses her again, her hand on Leliana's hip, the other under her chin; her touches are heavier, deliberate. I am real, I am here, I want this and you are wanted, I am going nowhere, you will not be rid of me so easily.

Morrigan's words are enough to make her eyes slip shut and leave her wanting just this, for a little longer. This space with just them and a window to forget the world outside. Her hands anchor more steadily, certainly, at Morrigan's hips, the warm heels of Leliana's palms pressing heavy against the crests of bone and muscle.

There's no breath of a word in response. It feels unnecessary, really, when instead she's able to lean into the kiss, dragging at Morrigan's lip with her teeth, slow and carefully and cautiously possessive--

-- and then a knock at the door comes.

"Lady Morrigan? I'm looking for Sister Nightingale. Rennard mentioned she'd come this way." A quiet voice with a Starkhaven accent and a somewhat apologetic tone, one who has been sent to deliver messages to Morrigan and who ferried chocolate spiders to her before.

Leliana's hands flex, grip hardened for the barest moment as she looks over her shoulder, utterly venomous, at the door. She is still silent, still does not speak, and very slowly turns to look back at Morrigan.

This is the worst.

Rarely does Morrigan have a problem with Leliana's messengers. Something, she suspects, that has everything to do with Leliana selecting those who will have very little reason to either care about Morrigan in the first place, or to certainly avoid those who would dare to show any sort of outright rudeness towards her.

"Damnation," she snaps, head jerking in the direciton of the door at the same time; it would funny if this were not so very fragile and they were not so very aware of that. But they cannot be selfish - when have they ever belonged entirely to themselves in the first place? "I must allow the Inquisition to have you back it would seem," a reluctant mutter, almost petulant.

There is time for a last brief kiss, for her lips at Leliana's ear to whisper.

"Kieran still goes to bed far earlier than you or I. I will send word when he is safely tucked in for the night that we might...resume our discussion."

(For the benefit of potential prying ears, she is here to help the Inquisition too.)

Her hands flex, and though that kiss is brief that makes it no less fierce, an edge of bite to it, before she soothes Morrigan's lip with something just barely more gentle.

As for the words, they feel more tenuous. More brittle and likely to splinter off and catch her if she is not careful. Morrigan's words are broken glass and need to be handled carefully. Leliana is not entirely at ease, not entirely certain either of them know what they are doing or what they want, and in the moment where pulling apart is necessary, wonders if she has made a critical blunder. What if this is a part of the Grand Game, for all Morrigan's disdain of it? What if this is not what she believes it to be?

She kisses Morrigan's cheek as her agreement, and even with the knots tangling in her gut, appears remarkably calm. Some part of her is aware there might be some of that stain Morrigan uses darkening her lips bled into her own, and she finds herself more thrilled by the thought than concerned.

Her own feelings on the matter are, in a word, complex.

"Later, then." A murmur, before she lets her fingers trail away from Morrigan's sides, and she makes for the door. Loudly, enough for the scout to hear, "I am on my way."

ooc: inbox/plot with me

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