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swindlefingrs · 11 months

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So I want to return the question to you! When did Kennach realize she was attracted to Lorath? Was it something that developed over the travels? When did she realize it

ah thank you for the ask! it took me a while to like sit and think this through.

for Kennach it was closer to act IV and V as she experiences just how much Lorath cares about other people.

she was fine simply traveling with some old drunk if it meant they could stop more people from being hurt by Lilith and Inarius. no skin off her nose. but after seeing his interactions with Donan, Taissa, and especially Neyrelle, she started catching feelings. turns out he wasn't a whiskey-pickled misanthrope like she first assumed.

the fact he waited in hell really affected her, too. she expected to meet him in some town somewhere like they had during the rest of their travels but there he was. she just survived one of the most terrifying things that's ever happened to her, the culmination of a months-long journey, and there's his familiar face.

Kennach puts those feelings aside because she's focused on the task at hand, though. They become more apparent to her after the story wraps and she's exploring more of Sanctuary on her own, meeting other people and learning new things, that she realizes how much she misses his company.

they meet up a few more times in different towns/settlements under the guise of discussing Neyrelle, but usually they turn into multi-hour "dates" where one or the other comes up with a reason to not say goodbye just yet and casually flirt a little more. i'm gonna say the fic i wrote picks up a bit after one of their last meet-ups.

#diablo iv #lorath nahr #kennach #lorath x wanderer #lorath x kennach #thank you! sorry it took so long #i was like 'wait how DID this happen??'

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swindlefingrs · 11 months

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Rotten and Craven

Rating: T Fandom: Diablo IV Characters: Kennach the Druid, Lorath Nahr Relationships: Lorath x Wanderer, Lorath x f!Druid, Lorath x Kennach Wordcount: 1.4k

[Read on AO3]

---

Lorath knows who is standing on his porch. Long months have been filled with those footsteps, although they haven’t ventured out to this corner of the wilds in some time.

Knuckles rap-tap-tap against his front door.

“Oh, so you do know how to knock.” Lorath shouts from his back room, making sure to scribble down his notes of the shaman’s skull in front of him, before he forgets. “I thought druids just go where they will. Based on my past interactions with the sods.”

He opens the door wide, ready to enjoy the frown on his visitor’s face. Kennach does not disappoint. Her round face is indeed set in a mildly annoyed frown. She fills the doorframe. Bedecked in druid finery; furs and bones, sticks and mud, runes and sinew.

“Perhaps if your home didn’t look like it’d been ransacked by bandits, I wouldn’t have assumed it was abandoned,” she quips.

“It’s research, not ransacking.”

Lorath willfully ignores the winsome dimple that shows up in her left cheek when she grins, and tips his chin at the large, waxed canvas bag at her feet. “So they've got you running errands now?”

Kennach picks it up as if it’s full of nothing but goose down and tosses it at him. He’s forced to catch the thing and his bad shoulder complains about the heft of it.

“More or less. I thought it’d be good to see a familiar face.”

“And you chose this one?” Lorath asks incredulously. “More fool you. Well, come in, come in. I know it’s rude to keep people waiting outside one’s abandoned hovel.”

Kennach brushes past him, the scent of cedar woodsmoke follows behind her. She stopped to pray before coming here. He fondly remembers her offering of a green cedar branch each night they had a fire while out on their hunt. She never translated her prayer and he never asked. He always took the small cedar needle she offered. She told him to chew it. It was powerfully tart. Refreshing.

He drops the heavy canvas bag onto his dining table with a whump. The plates, books, jarred samples, and cutlery all clatter. He opens the bag to find provisions. Small sacks of milled flour. Braids of garlic. Dried beans. Salt pork.

“I’m perfectly capable of getting to the market,” Lorath reminds her as he pulls out one flour sack. The fine bone-white powder dusts his hands. Soft as a whisper.

“Of course. If you head down to the market, though, you’re not gonna find that.” She taps at the package in his hand. “That’s red wheat. We found a few jars full of those grains in an abandoned store room in Túr Dúlra. It stands up to the cold and damp far better than the others. The farmers are excited. I was bringing some to Kyovashad to see about setting up orders for the rest of the crop.”

“Banished Lilith and on to delivering grain, are we?”

“The more I learn about the druids of Scosglen, it seems like the least I can do.”

“Have you found anything more about where they may have gone?”

“No, just everyone they left behind,” Kennach sighs.

“Aye, seems to be the way of things in Sanctuary.”

Lorath knows how this kind of guilt grows. It’s not kind. It’s not easy. It’s a bitter thing. Not pleasantly so like the cedar needles. Just bitter for bitter’s sake. The feelings would be even worse on a ride home with nothing but dark thoughts for company.

“Care to stay for some supper? Stew’s about done. Venison. Just tapped a fresh quarter cask, too.”

At the sound of his own invitation, he realizes that the only other chair to sit in is covered in books and papers. He hastily grabs the mess up and shoves it into a too-full bookshelf.

Kennach shrugs out of her great furred cloak and drapes it over the back of her chair. Her bare arms, covered in runes, are even larger and stronger than he remembered. Frequently.

“Only if you let me add drop biscuits to the stew.”

“Lucky for you, I just so happened to get a delivery of flour. Scosglen Red. I heard it's better than the shit coming out of the Dry Steppes. Finer mill. too. Makes your usual flour feel like eating sand.”

She rifles through his cupboards, pulling out ingredients, shouting over her shoulder, “Are you looking for work? I know a a mill looking for a salesman.”

“You couldn’t afford me.”

---

The center of the universe is a small wooden table in a windswept cabin, with Kennach and Lorath comfortably captured in its orbit. The beer is good. The stew topped with buttery biscuits is better. But the company is best, as much as he is hesitant to let himself admit it. Not the company herself, but for the complications. Because it always does.

Kennach’s stories about the people met in Scosglen are interesting. Some even funny. Her cheeks grow rosy as the meal and the conversation flows between them. She looks at him too long, but Lorath doesn’t want her to stop. He scoots to her side of the table and leans in too close as she shares charcoal rubbings from a druidic tablet she discovered, captivated by the translations and context she adds to each word and pictograph. He pronounces words wrong to hear her say them over again. He feigns ignorance after she catches on to the farce. She apologizes for shoving her shoulder into his and watching him wince.

It brings out her smile. Stoic on the road, smiling in his home. With him. That realization blooms in his chest. He chides himself for the ease at which this meal and this company has settled into his bones. How his focus on keeping all of this at arm's distance wanes as the evening waxes.

Kennach rests a broad hand on his knee and squeezes. He doesn’t get up or walk away, he leans in closer. She is enveloping.

She presses her lips to his and he returns it threefold. She tastes of beer and cedar. The tightness in his chest whirls. He half expects to see a succubus cackling at him when he opens his eyes, but it’s still the Wanderer. Her lips blushed and bruised. Her nose and cheeks are dappled with even more freckles than he last remembers. From days on the road, he supposes.

“And just how long have you been wanting to do that?” he murmurs.

“Since I stepped back through the portal in Hell and you were still there. Waiting.”

His last conversation with Donan. Time for apologies, unkind words, promises, and goodbyes.

“After Lilith?”

“Yes. I saw you were still there and… I wasn't as afraid.”

“You?” Lorath snorts, “Afraid?”

Kennach stares at him, searching his face for something, before her brow knits together and pain crawls along the edges of her eyes. All the mirth they built together is exorcized from his home. She drops her gaze to the table they share.

“All the time,” she quietly admits.

She was searching his face for sympathy. Understanding. He knows this wound. There are no words or deeds to staunch this kind of bleed. If there were, he’d have found it by now.

Lorath reaches out to gently turn her face towards him. Only when she meets his eyes again, does he continue.

“Me, too.”

The great bear woman nods sheepishly in understanding. The only ones not afraid are the too young and the too old to know better.

He presses his lips to hers gently at first, but she doesn't return it with kindness. Kennach is hurt. She challenges his sweetness with a biting kiss and he happily takes her bitterness. Their teeth clack against each other, but every moment he can keep her here instead of lost in that emotional morass, he’ll take.

“I want you”, she breaks their kiss and whispers against his neck. That one whisper topples his already ruined defenses.

“What's left of me is rotten and craven, but it's yours," he replies.

He slips his fingers under the edge of the thick leather armor of her breastplate where she is soft and yielding. Kennach shivers. The druid made of earth and stone, stalwart in the face of this world’s trials and tribulations, but his fingertips on her skin make her sigh sweetly.

This is why he traveled separately. This was always bubbling just under the surface. He knows how badly this could turn out. Hurt feelings. Hurt hearts. Hurt alliances. It wouldn't be the first time. He's not lucky enough for it to be the last. The Tree of Whispers will have its due. Tonight, though, they’ll have each other.

[Read on AO3]

#diablo iv #diablo 4 #lorath nahr #lorath diablo #lorath x wanderer #kennach #lorath x druid #lorath x f!druid #bisexual disasters #an inaugural lorath x wanderer fic #middle-aged romance #superfluous flour information #did i look up medieval beer brewing? yes.#did i use it? no.

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