The Herald and The Apostate

I

Solas was not the most gorgeous elf she had ever seen.

"No!  I'm not telling you about how many elves I snogged while with the Dalish!"

They'd started this playful argument as they lay in bed.  

He had been insistent that she keep from putting her clothes back on and returning to work.  He wanted her here, in this bed, with him.  But the conversation that sparked afterward was indulgent, childish, in every good way.  

"Come, Da'ean.  You must have caught an eye or eight whilst growing up."  He kisses her neck as he speaks, spurring her on.  

"Solas, just as you have not told me about any of your... escapades with the elves of old, I will not tell you about those that I spent time with."  He grins at this.  

Her expression turns suspicious as he looks at her.  "So you admit there were others.  Many of them."  She scoffs in frustration at this.

"Creators, Solas!  Yes, there were others."  She stops raising her voice as she looks at him, trailing the tip of her finger down his ear.  "But none like this.  None like you."  She whispers the last bit as his peppering of kisses goes lower.  

He stops at her belly button, turning his gaze upward.  "I know, Vhenan."  He references her acknowledgement that she had indeed had her first time with him.  

She grins, taking his reply as cocky arrogance.  "There was one that I remember well."  He blushes at this and goes back to kissing her, admiring every inch of the body he had ensured was his to worship, repeatedly.  

"My first love, I always thought.  But that was before,"  She takes a very long breath, as if remembering something very far in the past.  "Before I knew anything of great measure, anything about what love was."  Solas' hands wrap around the underside of her thighs as he pulls her closer to him, drawing his nose down the inside of her left leg so slowly it makes her hold her breath.  

When he looks back up at her, she's closing her eyes, patiently awaiting the moment he decides to give her what she craves.  "His name was Fabian.  No, Favrian.  Shit, I don't even know."  She chuckles.  "He was very handsy, trying to keep one hand on me at all times, like I was his property."  Solas stops what he's doing, hearing her words very, very clearly.

His bright blue eyes shine flawlessly down into hers.  "You are no one's property."  His words are clear, even, unyielding.  He will not have her deny this truth.  "Maybe I want to be yours, just a little.  Is that a crime?"  She kisses his collar bone, teasing him as she blows her breath upward, chilling the saliva left there by her luscious tongue.  

"Vhenan,"

The word is a warning, chastising in every way minus its literal meaning. 

"I love you.  More than anything in this world.  More than anything this life has given me.  But I would not see you belong to me in a way that gives you no choice in the matters of your life.  You are your own person.  I will never take that away from you.  Not even if you ask."  She chuckles at how serious he took her joke.  

She leans upward and kisses his mouth, reveling in the feel of his perfect, thin lips on hers, both gentle and firm at once.  

"You, God of Rebellion, have no mind for sarcasm.  I meant figuratively.  I give myself to you, wholly, figuratively."  She places a chaste kiss on his nose and he grins, loving the playful, wittiness of her.  

"Well,"  He mutters, placing himself further into the nook between her legs.  "In that case."  He kisses the crook of her neck, placing tender bites in her skin as she arks upward.