Prompt: Abelavellan, caught in the rain.
"In here!"
Laughing, Eve pulled Abelas after her to the shelter of an overhang. A sudden downpour had taken them by surprise, interrupting their tracking practice and drenching them both.
Eve leaned over to ruffle out her hair, smiling. She had missed days like these; journeying with the Inquisition was vastly different from traveling with her clan. Memories of her youth spent running wild through the woods and being caught in such storms were treasured, the sound of the heavy falls on the moss and logs the music of her adolescence.
"It's best to wait it out," she said as she straightened. "My clan used to travel extensively through the Free Marches – these showers are heavy, which means it should last less than an hour."
Abelas nodded, staring out into their surroundings. It had been midday, and the white-grey skies and torrential rain beautifully enriched the colors of the mosses and red bark. "I am accustomed to such weather," he said. "The jungles were much the same."
He had lowered his hood, and Eve took in the sight of him, gleaming mist on his skin and armor giving him an illusory shimmer in the light. He was faintly olive-toned, unlike her, and the green lines of his vallaslin traced striking patterns against it. She admired him often, though admittedly, the pull to do so was far stronger as of late.
He caught her staring, turning to her with interest. "What?"
She smiled, motioning to the but-for-the-grace-of-that-hood dry braid and the shorn sides of his head. "You're lucky," she told him. "My hair was wet before I could blink, and I've soaked my gloves trying to dry it." She held up her hands to demonstrate, dampness spreading into the embroidery.
She watched as he considered them for a moment before closing the distance between their positions, catching her wrists before she could lower them. He shed his own gloves silently, one at a time so as not to release her. One of her hands he guided to rest against his chest, setting to work on the other as he held it gently in place.
With long, nimble fingers, he sought out the seam at the edge of her left hand, tugging it up to mid-palm and revealing mere inches of skin beneath. One by one, he gently pinched the leather at her fingertips and pulled each free – pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb. Each movement, each pull was slow and deliberate and inexplicably intimate.
It was no effort, then, to slide the glove free and drape it over an exposed root jutting out from the rocky wall beside them. Eve gently bit at her long-suffering lower lip and followed his motions with her eyes as he set to the second hand.
The creeping vines hanging off the edge of the outcropping formed a living curtain, shuddering as water coursed down from leaf to leaf and dripped into the pools below. It flickered in Eve's peripheral vision, making the limited space under the rock face seem that much smaller as her right hand was identically and tenderly freed from its sodden confinement.
The second glove joined its mate on the root, and looking down at her bare skin, she couldn't remember the last time she had felt so exposed.
Before she could thank him – or protest, or whatever it was her mouth was incapable of doing – he bent slightly at the waist, plait falling over one shoulder as he pressed his lips to her palm. Warmth blossomed in the valley his mouth had settled into and spread to her fingertips, as well as lighting up something in her core that raised her other hand unbidden.
She had kissed him the day before in a heated moment, with no warning or preamble. It was Abelas' turn, now, and he also declined to take the path of warning – this was him asking permission, and the soft noise in her throat was Eve giving it.
His fingers threaded into her hair as he laid claim to her mouth, one arm round her waist to pull and lift ever so slightly, the motion carrying into her chin as she raised it to meet him. Her now-bare hands settled at the collar of his breastplate, fingertips seeking out the uncovered skin at the base of his throat and running along the polished metal. The way he touched her with respect, kissed her with an unspoken etiquette – thousands of years had made no difference in this particular style of communicating affection.
And yet for all that he observed such decorum, Eve mused as she parted her lips and yielded to his advances, they were no one here. Without another living soul around, she was not the Inquisitor, and he was not a wayward sentinel, and they could dispense with such formalities.
Her hands found his ears and they were lost to the world, Abelas' sigh of surrender drowned in the deluge.