Chapter Text
It feels like she has been falling through a dream, syrupy and cold, for an eternity. Solas’ writhing body in her arms and the point of his ear between her teeth are the only solid things in existence. She feels herself grow soft around the edges, her form dissolving, her earthly body no match for the raw magic of the Fade. The bedrock platform of Solas’ (and Rook’s) former (and present, and future) prison almost knocks her apart when they hit it, and she doesn’t get a second to make sure she is still solid before the Dread Wolf gains purchase on the ground and wrestles himself free of her with a canine snarl.
But Rook didn’t survive the Antivan Crow initiation just to be rendered useless and overwhelmed this easily. Whether the Fade is tearing her body apart or not, Solas is coming for her, lyrium dagger glinting and pulsing in tune with her heart. She scrambles backwards into a crouch, her own dagger quickly unsheathed from its place at her hip, her breath coming out in a hiss, which is half rage and half relief. She still has her strength, her mobility.
Good.
She will need it.
He throws himself at her, eyes full of lightning and teeth bared. Rook doesn’t move out of the way like he had probably expected - instead, she meets him mid-air, thrusting her shoulder against the chainmail of his stomach. It doesn’t matter that all it does is knock the air from his lungs - Rook knows she will lose this fight eventually. She isn’t fighting to kill, for once. She is fighting to hurt.
Her limbs are a flailing blur as she throws her dagger from one hand to the other as Solas tries to get on top of her and trap her wrists against the ground. She cannot let him. The pain from her broken arm sears through her and makes her blind, but she feels her blade puncture and slice and hears the following groan of pain. It soothes her more than any potion could.
It seems as if the Dread Wolf has completely lost his bearings to his rage. Instead of smiting her with his magic or turning her to ice like she has watched him do to a dozen darkspawn, his knuckles connect clumsily with her jaw. He has dropped the dagger. It is clear that this isn’t his usual way of going about things.
As soon as he gets himself together, Rook will be dead. So she’ll have to hit and cut and bite as many times as she can before that.
There are no thoughts in her mind; she shuts it all out. Her friends are dead, her house has fallen, and Southern Thedas is run through with blight. But at this moment, she doesn't care about any of it. Rook is no longer Rook. She is just a Crow. She is her blade, drawing Solas’ blood forth like she will die of thirst without it.
Her legs trap his body against hers as they wrap around his waist, and she could have laughed with malicious glee when he yells in frustration as she utilises her nimble form to somehow end up on top. She pulls his head back to expose his throat, slicing her dagger across it in a killing move no normal man could have survived. Unfortunately, Solas is not a normal man. Severing his head entirely probably wouldn’t even have killed him, anyway.
Cold, prickly magic wraps around her ankle like a chain and yanks her off of him so forcefully that she drops her blade. She watches the distance between her and it grow as Solas’ magic drags her across the ground, leaving her palms and her chin bloodied and raw. She’s hissing like an animal caught in a trap, and when he steps back into her field of view, his form trembles with rage and pure, untethered power.
Mierda.
"You!” He spits at her, one hand grasping his side where she has managed to stab him. “You insufferable, insolent child!”
He stalks closer, his proud posture broken, his magicking hand shaking with ire. “I have lived for thousands of years, and you are by far the worst-”
“Shut up!” Rook screeches at him, blood dripping fast from her broken lip as the magic traps her upside down, floating in space.
“Just kill me already, you fucking dog! Or are you going to talk me to death? If anyone can, it’s fucking you!”
Solas slams her into the ground in response, knocking stars into her vision and making her teeth clamp shut around her tongue.
“You have ruined everything! You have lost everything!”
Rook spits out a mouthful of bloodied saliva. She can keep goading him into giving her a quick death, certainly. But perhaps… she might not be able to manipulate the Fade in real life, but perhaps it is a different story here. This is the world of dreams. And whether she likes to think about it or not, as an elf, she is made of its matter.
She isn't sure how she does it. Has magic always been as easy as to push out a thought? To dispel a small, butterfly-flutter of intention into the world and then watch it turn into a hurricane at the tips of your fingers?
The logistics do not matter. Her thoughts make the ground beneath Solas’ feet move, and in his shock, he drops her. She does her best to shield her broken arm when she lands and rolls onto her feet with feline grace, surprising even herself.
“So persistent,” Solas growls, having regained his footing. Now what? He raises his hands again, both of them this time, his fingertips shining crimson with blood. It is his and hers, mixing like blue and red dyes to create something violently purple. Rook doesn’t understand what is happening, but she feels that purple like a glowing bruise in her mind, and suddenly, her mind is not entirely her own anymore.
Had he not used blood magic on her already, she wouldn’t have recognised the coppery aftertaste every thought she has suddenly carries.
No.
No.
She feels her whole soul bristle and retract as her mind touches something that does not belong to her, but then she pauses.
Her mind is touching something, tasting something that isn’t hers. Perhaps it is the Fade, or perhaps Solas has become clumsy in his wrath, but the connection goes both ways and suddenly, she is inside of his head.
And there she is: Rook. His Rook, shaped and moulded like clay between his hands. She sees herself as he does: a screaming speck of dust in his vast ocean of pawns to sacrifice, but not just that. Not anymore. His image of her is riddled with envy, admiration, and… heat. She views her actions through his eyes, sees every bit of defiance, every time he thought she would falter just to watch her brave his every expectation. Of all the pawns he has moved around the board of his rebellion against the Evanuris, Rook is his favourite.
And as much as shame and self-loathing echo right behind these thoughts, there is no mistaking it. He wants her.
I have lived for thousands of years, and you are by far the worst were his words. The worst. A hoarse chuckle, startled and caw-like, falls from Rook’s lips. Although it has meant dooming herself, Rook has bested him, and his desire for her now throbs in her own sex.
The connection between them is immediately severed like how a taut string is cut when Solas gets his mental defences in place, and for a moment, none of them move. Solas looks terror-stricken, and Rook can’t stop a creeping grin from splitting her face. She can taste the blood between her teeth. As far as last moments go, this one feels especially ridiculous.
He lunges for her again, knocking her to the ground and trapping her shock-weak form beneath him. She writhes against him, hissing, screeching, biting, and scratching, but he manages to trap her wrists above her head with a twist of her broken arm that renders her helpless. He should have melted her mouth shut instead.
I made people laugh at him, he’d said once. Laughter so mocking and taunting it drove a warlord to ruin. If nothing else, Rook can at least laugh at him from the grave.
“Is this how you imagined it?” She hisses up at him with whatever is left in her breathless lungs, squeezed flat by his weight. A brief flicker of confusion breaks up the rage in his eyes. His cheeks are still darkened by humiliation.
Rook cuts deeper. “You pinning me down like this? Getting on top of me?”
He all but growls down at her, briefly lifting her off the ground just to slam her back into it with dizzying force.
“Silence!”
Her back aches, but she will not let up. She twists the knife.
“Did you think of taking me here in the Fade, or did you imagine a bed? In your office, in the lighthouse? In your bed at Skyhold, where you fucked the Inquisitor before you betra-”
She doesn't get to finish her sentence before he grabs her hair and smacks the back of her head into the ground so hard that all she sees for a moment is darkness. Blindly, she knees him in the stomach as hard as she can, and he groans in frustration, fed up with her like a horse would be with a fly.
Her fingertips are beginning to tingle. Blood is pooling in the back of her throat. She isn’t sure how, but she manages to twist out of his grasp enough to knee him in the face this time. She crawls backwards as fast as she can, and when he pulls her back by her ankle, she is ready. The bottom of her boot connects with his nose with a satisfying crunch, giving her an opening to collapse him with a solid blow to the inside of his elbow. As soon as his shoulder hits the ground, she is on him.
Back on top.
“Or is this how you wanted it?” She taunts, spitting blood like a venomous snake. “Mythal, the Inquisitor, me … like women in power, do you? Does the mighty Dread Wolf like to be under someone, for once?”
His eyes burn bright with magic for no more than a second, and she is sent flying through the thick air for an endless moment - her last moment unruined, unviolated. When the great, invisible hand of his power catches her mid-flight and slams her into the rock, the impact is so savage it makes her gag.
And then, the Dread Wolf takes her.
She bucks and she thrashes and she writhes when he descends upon her and tears her longcoat apart. She is too small and too weak in this realm to fight him off, too foggy in her battered head to even try.
When he rips open his own trousers, cold fear climbs Rook’s spine as she realises what he’s about to do. She shrieks and aims her snapping teeth at his face, but she is too slow, and he is too fast. A forceful smack across her face with the back of his hand sends her head lolling and scatters her thoughts for a moment.
“Look what you have done!” Solas shouts at her much louder than he has to when he is this close. “Look what you have made me!”
She feels the fat head of his cock sliding between her folds, catching on her entrance for just a moment before one of them flinches away from the violation about to happen. She is not sure if it is herself or him who recoils, and it does not matter, because a second later, Solas has regained his composure and pins Rook down by her hips so hard she feels a crack in her pelvis.
“Is this what you wished for, Rook?” He spits her name out as if it is a curse. “Is this what you wished to goad me to do? To prove that I am the monster you believe I am?”
He thrusts into her with a swift preciseness she has only ever witnessed from the knife-wielding hand of an assassin, and he slams to the hilt, and Rook cries out as sharp pain cuts through her.
She takes advantage of his hands on her hips, and she claws at his face, but a single glare from his white-hot eyes has her wrists pinned above her head with invisible strings. She screams when he ruts into her - not in agony, but in anger, and he clenches his jaw so hard it ought to break his teeth.
His pace is rapid and punishing. Relentless. Bruising. The pain and the feeling of him overwhelm her until she is hazy, and she watches him take her as if time has slowed, watches each snap of his hips, watches how his nostrils flare with rage and effort.
She doesn’t snap out of it before he lowers his head and bites her, sinking his teeth into the soft flesh of her breast. She howls and writhes and curses, and finally, he lets up. He lets go of her hips and puts his iron-clad hands on either side of her head, one of them pinning her head to the ground by her hair.
It is clear he intends to stop this madness before it goes even further, but when he pulls himself from her midst, Rook’s body betrays her. To her enormous horror and to Solas’ contempt, her hips buck off the ground, chasing his cock as he moves away. The Dread Wolf looks down at her with such acidic hatred it could have corroded her very bones.
“You are no better than a beast,” he snarls. Rook retorts without thinking. She always retorts without thinking.
“Fucked a lot of those, have you, Wolf?”
Her voice is sharp and fragile and the carrier of so much malice that she almost doesn’t blame him when he growls and thrusts into her again. This time, much to Rook’s shame, his passage is slick.
He releases her hands from their hold, and she slaps him clear across the face, snapping his head to the side. Instead of restraining her again, he ducks low and sinks his teeth into her once more, this time on the side of her neck, right above where her pulse races beneath her skin.
Rook can’t help herself. She moans.
Her hands claw helplessly at his broad shoulders, nails digging into the nape of his neck, but she can’t deny it any longer. Even now, even in this situation with a person he despises so, Solas knows what he’s doing. She hates him for it, but not half as much as she hates herself.
“I should have killed you when you disrupted my ritual,” he barks into the sore, bruised skin on her neck. Rook locks her leg around his, collecting her strength until she can flip them over with effort greater than it should be. Her injuries are weakening her.
Still, she sneers down at him, her hands shooting forward to lock around his still-bleeding throat. Her broken arm burns, but she feels his cock stir within her.
Oh?
“I fucking wish you had,” she hisses at him, using his windpipe as support as she rides him. “Death would have been much more pleasurable than having you bitching and moaning in my head!”
His eyes flash darkly, and Rook doesn’t even process how it happens as he all but disappears from beneath her and she’s pushed forward onto the cold stone. She cries out in shock and pain and arousal as he forces himself into her again, pressing until his hips are flush against her ass. Her spine feels as if it’s about to snap when he pulls her back to his chest by her throat, his large hand squeezing until she sees stars.
“Do not speak to me of pleasure, Da’len.”
Rook screams the word no, or she tries to, but Solas’ iron grip on her throat cuts her off as the other one trails carelessly down her body until his blood-soaked fingers find her swollen clit. Tav experiences true fear, then: not of dying, not of him hurting her, not of whatever god-like stamina he might be wielding. No, what she fears is losing. The fall from grace and the breaking of her pride would be very, very steep if it happened while she was coming on his cock.
She cannot allow it. She will not allow it.
She thrashes against his hold, but it is of no use. It only makes him squeeze her throat harder, and when the tingling sensation of unconsciousness begins to blur the edges of her vision, he lets go just enough for her blood circulation to regain its composure.
“Say my name,” he speaks against the shell of her ear.
“Fuck. You.”
He tears away her blouse with his teeth and bites her shoulder hard enough to draw blood, and gods damn it all, she comes.
She wants to gag, shame in her veins blushing her cheeks crimson, and Solas laughs cruelly into her skin as her cunt pulses rhythmically around him. Rook wails. She speaks every curse word she knows when he refuses to let up, and her body twitches out of her control as he tortures her sensitive clit.
“Say my name,” he repeats, but he doesn’t give her the chance to obey (as if she would!) before his hand on her throat clamps down again. He’s too focused on depriving her head of blood to notice how her hand slips toward her boot, procuring the tiny, deadly blade she keeps there for emergencies.
He bellows in pain when she slices his arm from wrist to elbow, and for a beautiful, delightful moment, Rook thinks she has a chance to escape as his grip loosens. However, just as she begins to move, he grabs her head and slams her forehead into the stone floor.
For a moment, she is completely deaf and blind. The world is gone from her. The only thing she feels is Solas’ relentless thrusting, and she sobs with pain and humiliation when she comes again. The dizzying delirium in her head only makes the world spin faster as she comes undone, gagging on her own blood as she sobs and shrieks with equal parts pain and pleasure.
He fucks her into the ground with ice-cold brutality and without a shred of mercy, and Rook will never forgive herself for how much hot slick it has her gushing. Her body betrays her mind twice more before she manages to choke out that he’s killing her.
Solas pulls out and flips her over, landing her on her back. His smile is wicked and mean and it makes her stomach turn - from desire or fear, she decides not to wonder.
“No, Rook,” he says, his voice almost too low for her to hear. He plunges back into her, making her whole body flinch as if that will save her. “This is my domain. You will not die unless I will it.”
He emphasises his point with a hard thrust, and she moans against her will, the flush in her cheeks more shame than anything else at this point. The next time she balances on the edge of a climax, Solas stops moving. Rook’s pussy throbs around his cock, and she digs her nails into his shoulders. He looks so full of himself she just might vomit.
“Say my name, Rook.”
Oh, you piece of shit.
His pace is slow and hard now, and his mouth is soft and warm and open against the bleeding bite mark on her neck as he fucks her. She feels the stuttering of his hips, hears his breathing grow ragged. When her hand closes around his throat again, robbing his brain of oxygen and forcing him to look at her tear-stained face, he slams home one final time. His wounded arm can no longer hold him, and he falls onto his elbow, the other hand preoccupied with keeping her hips still as he spills inside her. He sounds much more like an animal than a man, and as much as Rook loathes to admit it, he looks much more handsome than he has any right to. The fact that he has finally finished fills her with both relief and disappointment in equal measures, though she is unsure if he plans to let her live after this or not.
She isn’t sure what she feels when he, seemingly entirely unbothered, begins again.
It feels as if he will never stop. He breaks her, and when her whole body shakes with pleasure, her cunt pulsating around his punishing length, his damned name leaves her mouth again and again in a babbling prayer that will haunt her forever. Solas chuckles darkly, pressing himself into her hips, rubbing against a sore, swollen spot deep inside her.
“There it is. Was that so difficult?” He mocks, his voice husky with lust and triumph. Bastard. She will never say his name again, she promises herself. A vow she very quickly breaks as he makes her come again and again and again, every time leaving her more mortified and humiliated than the last until she finally, mercifully blacks out.
“Rook. Can you hear me?”
Her whole body aches. She breathes carefully as if expecting some great pain when her lungs expand in her chest. She has never felt this close to death in her life.
She coughs weakly and opens her eyes, and there he is. The Wolf.
He’s resting his weight on his hands as he looks down at her, his expression cold and almost composed. Whatever emotion is happening beneath the icy surface is unknown to her. When he sees that she is indeed alive, he rolls his eyes, but not quickly enough for her not to spot the tiny flicker of relief in his gaze. Then, he vanishes.
Rook might have been lying there staring into the grey sky for hours before she dares to move. Everything in her screams, her pain receptors going haywire as she sits. She looks around for Solas, and finds him. He’s sitting with his back turned a few hundred metres away, curled up like a sullen child, his violating hands clasped together behind his head. She cannot hear him, but even from here, Rook can see how his shoulders shake.
She stands up on shaky legs and winces at the pain that seems to reach from deep within her to the godsdamned ends of her hair. Then, turning her back on the Dread Wolf, she walks away, determined to find the spot in their shared prison furthest away from him.