Chapter Text
Love, unrequited, robs me of my rest:
Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers:
Love, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest,
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!
Sleep did not come easy to Emmrich that night. His thoughts raced, his mouth was dry, he tossed and turned until he felt half-mad with frustration. It wasn’t that his bed was uncomfortable, nor had Manfred brewed his tea too strongly. He wasn't bothered by the eternal dawn-dusk of the Fade — in fact, he found it comforting, reminiscent of the green Veilfire lamps that lit the Necropolis. No, the cause of his misery was nothing so simple.
It was all Johanna’s fault. Yes. That was it. He had been lax, and she'd taken advantage of it.
Earlier that day, he had been demonstrating the use of a new rune that he'd enchanted for his comrades’ equipment. During the presentation, he had noticed a few minor adjustments he could make, and asked Bellara to retrieve an arcane focus from his laboratory. When she returned, she was carrying something else alongside his focus - a heavy, leatherbound old tome. He hadn't paid it much mind, engrossed in the demonstration, until Bellara yelped in alarm.
Immediately, all eyes were on her, including Emmrich's. He only had time to recognize that she was holding a very particular book from his personal library, and his stomach dropped, but by then it was too late and the whole terrible comedy of errors had begun. Bellara had been idly fidgeting as he spoke, and she'd prised open the book's false back. With the creak of rusted springs, it popped open in her hands, and she fumbled to keep her grip.
Papers spilled from the hidden compartment and scattered across the table. Emmrich leapt across the room in a second, heart in his throat. All he could think to do was to cry “Wait!”, uselessly.
Harding, damnably helpful as always, bent to pick a piece of paper up off the floor. As she took a closer look and realization dawned, her expression changed to drop-jawed, wide-eyed awe. Emmrich cringed, wishing that he could snatch the offending illustration out of her hands (or better yet, set it alight) but Taash was already leaning over and wolf-whistling. “Damn,” they said, sounding almost impressed.
“Please,” he fretted, “those are very personal–”
“I'm so sorry, Professor,” Bellara hastened to apologize. “I had no idea that this was, um,” she paused to take a closer look at the yellowed sheaf of drawings she was clutching. “That you, uh… oh, wow,” she trailed off, eyes roving despite her clear distress. She took a quick peek at the second page, then stopped with a guilty look.
There was a pit in Emmrich's stomach. Across the meeting table, his teammates were shifting and murmuring to themselves. No doubt, everyone had seen all they needed to. Rook looked stunned, Davrin had a contemplative gleam in his eye. Even Lucanis was blushing furiously. Maker help him.
“I would greatly appreciate having those back. Now,” he said to the room, summoning whatever tatters of his dignity remained.
It was Neve, in the end, who quickly plucked the drawings from the others’ hands and returned them to Emmrich. Her eyes flicked over them, cool and impassive, as though they were the least interesting thing in the world. “Here you are,” she said, reassuringly casual.
He thanked her and stared, resigned, at the old charcoal illustrations. A much younger man stared back at him, low-lidded and sultry, wearing a silk robe that left hardly anything to the imagination. The young man was reclining, his robe falling open to expose a bare length of leg. Come back to bed, his expression seemed to say. The eyes were kohled, the mustache as tidy as he'd always kept it. Emmrich sighed. It really was a very good likeness. As was the one underneath it – a different outfit and a different pose, but still unmistakably him. None of these life drawings were nudes, but in each one he was wearing garments that were so sheer that full nudity might have actually been less suggestive.
“How in the world did you get a hold of this book?” he asked Bellara with some agitation, though there was really only one answer that made sense.
“Johanna told me you'd forgotten to take it with you, so I brought it,” she gabbled, panic-stricken. “I didn't realize – I shouldn’t have – I'm so sorry.”
Emmrich shook his head glumly. Only Johanna could have known about the book's hidden compartment and the papers it concealed. She had been his friend all those years, through all the youthful romances — stayed up late wine-fueled nights with him through the excitement and the tears and Maker, the stories. How he'd blushed recounting his amorous exploits, and how she'd laughed at his lovestruck soppiness.
One such story had started when they were students, when Emmrich set his mind to making some extra coin as an artist's model. He spent late nights in the studio with a handsome portrait artist named Tomasz, modeling for works that never saw the inside of a gallery for fear of public indecency charges. Years after they'd amicably parted ways, he'd courted a woman called Heloise, a canny, delightfully sharp art dealer from Val Royeaux. So he commissioned his old friend Tomasz to paint an erotic portrait of him for her private enjoyment – only, she broke off their relationship before the work was ever completed. That left him with a broken heart, a multitude of naughty sketches, and quite a lot of unresolved sexual tension, and he'd ended up running right back into Tomasz’s arms. Such drama!
Lovers came and went with the years, but his wayward friend and colleague was a constant – until she wasn't. Johanna was the only one who remembered that book where he’d stashed away his long-forgotten mementos, hidden in plain sight. And now those memories were all she had left to wield against him, now that she was reduced to her current form. It was petty behavior, Emmrich thought, pointless lashing-out for nothing but her own amusement. But if it was to be her revenge for the events at Blackthorne, it was a very minor one, all things considered.
He sighed. The wave of mortification had crested and all that remained was to pick up the pieces.
“You couldn't have known, Bellara,” he said to her. “It was a rather mean-spirited joke on Johanna’s part,” he said, raising his voice loud enough that it could be heard down the corridor to his laboratory.
“A joke, Volkarin? Hardly!” came a sharp, spectral voice, through the open door. “I'm not surprised that you left the book out on your desk where any fool with limbs could paw through it."
Emmrich cringed, though it was true. Indignity upon indignity. "Johanna, you have betrayed both Bellara's trust and mine!" he hollered down the corridor.
"Think of it as a bit of friendly team-building," was her sneering reply. "You need to open up more. After all, you opened up for Tomasz, and Judit, and Gábor, and that horrible Werneke fellow, and both of those brothers from Antiva, and the Orlesian…”
“That's quite enough!” He raised his hand, summoned some force magic, and slammed the door shut. The muffled sound of her cackle reverberated in the pin-drop silence that followed. He could not bear to look up again and see the expressions his companions wore.
“Right,” said Rook, who sounded eager to get the whole thing back on track. “Sorry, Emmrich. Did you want to finish telling us about the runes?”
“I… no," he replied, deflated. "I believe I'd just managed to get my point across, thank you, Rook. If there are no further comments about my presentation I'll bid you all a good evening.” He retreated to his room, sweeping past Johanna and her smug prodding, up to his bed where he buried his head under a pillow like a sulking teenager.
It wasn't that he was ashamed of his history – not at all. Those were happier times, full of excitement and interesting people. But he could not deny the embarrassment that surged through him now. Perhaps it was that his friends had seen those decades-old drawings, that he'd even kept them so close at hand to begin with. They were withered favors, signifying nothing except an old man’s vanity and foolish sentimentality. Yet he clung onto them still. They belonged to an Emmrich Volkarin who was still in the flower of youth, vital and carefree, bringing a new lover home whenever the mood took him. And now… now he was thirty years older, and very single, and most nights terribly lonely, even with Manfred and all of his wonderful new colleagues. It shamed him to dwell on it, but how could he not?
So the scene played and replayed in his head as he lay in bed and the minutes ticked by into hours. He drifted in and out of sleep, in a hazy, half-lucid reverie. That gave him an idea. Mages could explore the Fade as they slept, even enter the dreams of others. It was an impolite habit, to be sure, and Emmrich rarely found himself doing so intentionally. But he was still keyed up from the evening’s events, nerves simmering with anxiety. Rook's stunned silence, Bellara's frantic eyes, all of it haunted him.
Perhaps, he reasoned, he could take a tiny peek into what his colleagues were dreaming. Yes. That might put his mind at ease. Or at least provide a distraction. Surely, at the bare minimum, there was no way he could suffer any further mortification.
Surely.