Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It is long after the end, winter white and forbidding around Skyhold once again, and Dorian stays.

The Inquisition has outgrown its humble rebel origins and stabilised into a power to be reckoned with; those who would reckon with it are likewise multiplying. Some of the Inquisitor's old inner circle still come and go. She welcomes them all with quiet, warm hospitality, and never asks them to stay for another day.

Neither has she asked Dorian. She comes up almost every day, sometimes with an arcane conundrum she is pondering, a piping-hot pot of tea or just a wordless request for company, but the end is always open. There's no looped rope nor iron ring there to moor him.

Cole haunts the tavern rafters, and Cassandra, the training yard and the forge. He learned only some time ago that she's a passable weaponsmith. Blackwall most likely still broods by the stables. Since Dorian has not stopped finding rude drawings tucked into his notes, he presumes Sera's continued presence. He pens scathing art critique in the margins and pins them to her door in the tavern. She pours vinegar into his Fereldan beer while he's distracted by a book or by undoubtedly tall tales of the Chargers' latest exploits.

The Bull's Chargers have shaped into some of the Inquisitor's favoured agents. As such, they are often gone, and Dorian joins their excursions if there's research to pursue--or parties in need of a fireball to the face--in the same direction. Now the snow has stifled even the more martial of businesses.

The Chargers do what Dorian has come to understand all soldiers do in wintertime: run drills, mend their equipment, have petty rows that are drowned in cheap ale by the evening bell, and play dice and cards and whatever else can be fashioned into a game of chance. One ill-considered evening he offers to teach them chess, and finds himself across the board from a fiercely frowning Stitches for several nights thereafter. They loiter about the tavern and the training yard, and persist in their attempts to press Dorian into their raucous singalongs. If he doesn't get outside the castle walls soon, he may yet lose his mind and cave to the demand.

It becomes his favoured grievance this time of year: if the Empress of Orlais has a Winter Palace, how is it possible the Inquisition lacks seasonal headquarters in a more reasonable climate? The road to Skyhold has been buried for weeks. If it weren't for the abominable cold that hardened the fresh-fallen snow into a layer only fools and Inquisition scouts with snow shoes and mabari sledges dare tread upon, they'd be cut off from the world for good.

"We'd find somewhere peachy warm to call kip. Port. Whatever. You'd carry those books down in your skinny mage arms," Sera says from the next stool over. "You whinge about how"--she makes a game but doomed attempt at mimicking him--"this library's piss and nonsense, but no way you'd leave it behind."

"I could get new books," Dorian ripostes. "Considering anywhere to the north of here is an improvement in terms of both learning and printing."

"And what, carry them back for the summer?" Sera pushes her empty tankard back and forth between her hands. "Bet you could sweet-talk your big Tal-What's-It par-a-moor. He'd carry you and the books."

"Paramour," he corrects without thinking, then pauses. "Which is not the case here."

She makes a face. "Oh, right. I didn't hear you making kissy faces behind the corner. Woke me up last night. Right under my window, you know."

"I shall make an effort to remove my trysts from your presence."

"Tosh," she says magnanimously. "Fill this mug, it'll be bygones."

Some nights he does wonder what he's still doing here. The Inquisitor has to range further and further afield to seal the remaining ruptures in the Veil. Half the old company has returned to reclaim or rebuild their lives in the wider world. While his services as a heretical rebel archivist have bolstered--have saved, on more than one occasion--the scholarly efforts of the Inquisition, it's slow work for scarce gain.

"One more for her." He catches the tavern keeper's eye and makes a little flourish at Sera. "And another for me, at that." The mulled wine he's been drinking loses some of its potency when the spices are mixed in, but the warmth is the main attraction.

"So. Heard we're going back to that lion place. Soon as snow lets up." Claiming her brimming tankard, Sera picks up a fingertip's fill of the foam.

"Hopefully after something other than Red Templars this time." Dorian can't pretend the news doesn't perk him up. Emprise du Lion would at least have a gentler elevation than the Frostbacks.

"Her Glowiness came by. They rustled up another dragon." She crows with disbelief or delight. "Fancy that! That's got to be the worst luck. Two fire-spitting shites in the same town." As the weight of her own words catches up to her, her mouth skews with unhappy determination. "So we're going."

"Did she specify that it was a fire-breather? I'd rather not have a repeat of that disaster in the Emerald Graves." If he had more of a draconologist in him, his bibliography would be burgeoning. As it is, he sends field notes to Professor Frederic of Serault, who procures him a few civilised comforts from his own assignments. Dorian might have to write a note of thanks for the crate of Vyrantine oranges. Half of them were still edible when they were unloaded from the sleigh. He was actually cheerful about that.

"Ehh," Sera says. "Dragon."

"I will never cease marvelling at your ability to disdain the obvious." The evening is yet young. He might catch Lavellan herself at leisure, go to a more reliable source for details. "We've fought several dragons that put the lie to that old preconception."

"You're a precon-shite," she says. "See when we get there, yeah? Go think at somebody else."

"As the lady wishes--" He leans back to duck a dash of ale foam flung at his head. She swears sanguinely as the spatter instead hits Grim, who is slouching his way towards the Chargers' usual table.

Snatching up his wine, Dorian sidles away from the ensuing fracas. The Herald's Rest is thick with bodies and laughter, the minstrel's warbling momentarily muted by Sera's volley of insults at the Chargers, roused to defend their companion. There will be some knocking of heads and trading of barbs, and she might wake up sprawled across their table when Cabot finally closes the bar.

Squaring his shoulders and hiding his smile, he goes to look for the Inquisitor. A spot of dragon-hunting might be the very thing to untangle him.

They lay plans to depart for Emprise du Lion as soon as time and weather allow. Lavellan wants to arrange to meet Cassandra, who is away on a private journey, something or other about reforming the Seekers, and a message must be sent. Dorian accepts that, sufficiently brightened by the prospect of a field venture that he can summon patience.

While they wait for a returning raven, the cold mellows. The commander sends his troops, stewing in their inactivity, out to open the road to the pass and the first waystation. Armed with shovels they trudge out into the snow. All of Skyhold seems to stir from its midwinter torpor.

Then the letter arrives.

The spymaster delivers it to Dorian personally. That makes it a favour, but he barely even mutters thanks before excusing himself to the precarious privacy of the library. The paper is stained by courier gloves, by salt and damp. All the same he thinks he can smell roses and ambergris, daubed onto her wrists, under the stark black ink that his mother favours.

He reads everything with care. It's strange to have written modern Tevene in front of him instead of the antiquated register of his academic or alchemical tomes. He focuses on that so that the contents of the letter stay a little further away.

At dusk he's still ensconced in his chair. The randomly selected treatise he opened in his lap must be gathering dust on the page, a pointless ruse now. In his mind he's drawing distances and weighing the risks of the road--not towards Southwest Orlais, but the Free Marches. Josephine will know which captain to speak to for passage across the Waking Sea. He hates ships. The land route will take an extra month, which he by all accounts does not have.

He lets the book drop where it will and leaves the library. One pool of torchlight blends into another in the corridors, but he's had three years to walk these halls in light and darkness. It was never meant to be that long. The Inquisition, the damnable, freezing, dreary south, were supposed to hold answers.

They held something. Just not the things he thought he came to find.

The door at which he stops is shut but not locked. For a place to collapse at the end of the day, it's deliberately chosen: next to the corner tower with its spiral staircase, and on the second floor. Any assailants have to come from at least two directions. Iron Bull explained this to Dorian once, sprawled on the cool floor in deep summer, the bed too smothering to sleep in by his claim.

The stone exudes chill through Dorian's soft leather boots. He could go. Leave the Inquisitor what barest explanation is required. She would disapprove but she wouldn't stop him.

Before he can turn, the door swings inward. "I can hear you waffling, 'Vint. Warmer to finish your thinking in here."

Blasted qunari hearing. Blasted cold. He can feel it creeping up his calves. The half-open door lets out a wedge of firelight and a waft of heat, and so Dorian steps over the threshold. The fire is built high in the hearth, the shutters latched and the curtains drawn. Bull turns back to the pauldron in his hands, scrubbing at a stubborn bloodstain with an oiled rag.

"Something crawl down your throat tonight?"

Oh, yes. Repartee is expected. Even when they've been at it so long that much of it is mere rhythm, the back-and-forth a habit rather than a true challenge, he should have come with a sardonic comment on the tip of his tongue.

His hand pushes the door back into its jamb. He leans against the roughly sanded wood. His voice catches and he hates it, hates that the splinters of grief and confusion pierce everywhere until there's nothing of him that is not raw. "Make me not think."

"Straight to the point." Bull sets down his work but remains seated on the bench by the fire. "All that reading finally melted down your sparkling wit, eh? I like it. Always good to hear you say what you want."

Dorian almost falls into the old game. He could tch and affect prickly offence, or even admit that on this rare occasion he means what he says and is too worn for witticisms.

If their little-defined arrangement has taught him anything, it is that half the time, Bull reads him better than he gauges himself. That was why he dawdled at the door. The letter is like a hook in his flesh, dragging on him until he heeds its pull or tears apart. Conscious of his gait, of the fear that clings like pitch to his bones and shivers hot in his throat, he crosses the floor. It's not fear of Bull--the idea would seem inconceivable to him now--but of the weight in the air, the unspoken understanding that guided him here of all places in Skyhold.

"I hope you plan to do something about it." Whatever husks his voice will hopefully have the right note of a dare.

"Dorian." Bull's fingers, three whole, two stumped, wrap around his upper arm. The grip steadies rather than suggests. "I'm good with that." The but is implied loud enough, if only in the sound of Dorian's name.

"Then take a hint, you insufferable oaf." Pressing his hand flat on Bull's shoulder, Dorian leans in. With Bull sitting down, their height difference is reversed. This should not be strange. How many times has he slunk into this very room, or Bull stumbled into his, to share anything from a night's sleep to a bed-breaking fuck that threatens to wake their unlucky neighbours?

"Hint taken, no need to worry about that." Bull draws him into the broad curve of his body, right hand on the back of his head, irresistible in a way that once might have unnerved him. "Distract you first, then make you talk. Got it."

"Vishante kaffas," Dorian grumbles under his breath. It seems Tevene comes safer, offers a flimsy screen of deniability if he should say too much. "Mentes simplices, simpliciter delectatas..."

"You want to get more specific, now is a good time. In Common, probably." Bull frees the fastenings of his robes at the shoulder. There is a heartbeat in which Dorian imagines stopping him, derailing them from this predictable, pleasant course and confessing, I have to go.

"No," he says softly. He climbs astride Bull's thighs and kisses the cloven scar across his mouth and then his mouth. If it's too rapt and aching for a first kiss of the night, that blame can be pinned on simple urgency. "Just let me not think for a while."

Sometimes he is blessed by this vexing, impossible bond between them. He can ask and be given reprieve without explaining why. Dorian is astute enough to realise that Bull knows something is troubling him; he only chose to ask his questions later.

Dorian hides behind that spell of clemency and hopes it will last long enough. He came for his goodbyes under the guise of sating a bout of lust. Void take him, but that is the truth. When he fumbles at buckles and laces and spreads his hands across Bull's naked skin, he wills the touch to explain what he can't.

Their clothes go one by one, let fall here and there with a lack of care that would once have nettled him right out of the mood. The bed, its carpentry sturdy to hold a qunari frame, creaks familiar under their tangled weight. Dorian draws himself up to bite at Bull's shoulder. Gently, a tug of teeth followed by an open-mouthed kiss on the same spot. This he learned early: Bull, who wields pain as a weapon, funnels his own agony into controlled, bloody-edged rage at their enemies, does not invite it into bed. All things have their places, he said. Dorian, to hide his bemusement, nodded and carried on.

It makes sense to him now. Bull steers his face up with a hand and kisses him, warm and steady and focused. Bull's fingers stay pressed around the nape of Dorian's neck. In its slow, trembling intensity, the kiss seems meant to reel him in.

Eventually Bull wraps his hands around each of his arms, slides them down over elbow and forearm to his wrists, and pulls Dorian's arms up above his head. He does not resist, not even for the sake of form. He does, however, mutter, "Kiss me," and almost thinks he's ruined his pretence until Bull does. He fits his mouth over Dorian's and it becomes a wet, raw, ravenous thing, Dorian straining up to hold the contact for as long as he can.

Bull leans away. Dorian thumps his head onto a pillow, gasping for breath. The fine hempen rope wound around his wrists is a strange kind of relief: if he's going to pieces, at least something tethers him. He's been here, with the same shadows on the walls and the same rows of stone and plaster along the ceiling, so often before. He's had Bull on this bed and on the floor, and on one memorable occasion in a chair not designed for such abuses. They've broken bread and complained about the lack of fresh fruit in winter over the table with the crooked leg no one ever fixed.

Every line and shape in this room is drawn thick with memory. Bull trails long strokes down Dorian's ribs and chuckles when Dorian bucks against his open hands. No commonplace craving, this, and he betrays that fact in his needy noises. At least the thoughts coiled in his head unspool themselves under Bull's patient hands, even when he no longer knows if their touch is more soothing or maddening.

He tilts his head to the side for a hazy glimpse of the firelight slanting across the doorjamb. It stains the weathered wood a soft, shifting maroon. There he somehow ended up with a splinter in his palm, thwarting one promising encounter conducted against the wall. Bull's mouth, on his stomach, his hip, then sure and slow on his cock, drags him back to the present. Dorian swears, throwing his back into a sharp arc since his hip is held in Bull's unrelenting grip. The pliant, warm strokes of Bull's tongue send white flame surging behind his eyes.

All through Bull's painstaking efforts to drive him blank-minded with pleasure, he keeps talking. It always takes much--verging on too much--before his words falter. First they flow in Common and later, with him far enough gone, in stammering Tevene. It is as if he couldn't hold the complexities of learned language, as if the oaths and entreaties welled from too deep for anything but his first tongue.

His release builds so gradually that it nearly hurts. He could speak, he could ask, he could stop Bull with a word. Instead he digs his nails into his palms and bears the shallow, teetering ascent. Bull doesn't stop, and Dorian thrashes against his mouth and his fingers fit to rattle the bed. The climax unfurls like a sunburst up his spine. He comes with fire licking in his belly, under his fingernails, upon his tongue. The sound that wrests itself from him is ragged and foreign to his echoing ears.

Bull lets out a bark of laughter. "Been a while since you last set something on fire in my bedroom."

Despite his amusement, that is alarming. Dorian inhales. Hard, once, and another time. The indrawn air washes away the lingering sear of mana spent. "Ah. What did I..."

He lifts his bound arms and feels the slight pins and needles in the muscles. The rope comes free, burnt black where he had his fingers fisted around it. Bull intercepts him, tugs the knots open, rubs his fingers over one wrist.

Dorian casts his eyes at the ceiling with a groan. "I will not live this down for a while, will I?"

"Hey," Bull says with a skewed shrug. "It wasn't the curtains this time."

Something hot and stinging wells in Dorian's throat. He tamps it down and turns onto his side to face Bull. "Small victories."

He can hear the rapid, rumbling beat of Bull's heart, its normal rhythm slower than a human's. Bull sets a hand on his lower back as he shifts closer, knocking his knee into Bull's thigh. Bull's muffled breath rasps against Dorian's mouth. He breaks the kiss with a huff of self-denigrating laughter. "And I am, to my shame, getting ahead of myself."

Bull strokes a thumb across Dorian's jaw. "If you're offering, I'm not saying no."

A year and a half on, Dorian is still completing this picture. Bull was clear about the important things, utterly and candidly so. Dorian vividly remembers his ears burning at points in the conversation, and he counts himself neither shy nor prudish. But there are other mandates, unquiet laws of need and desire that do not fall into ready words. One of them is that it pleases Bull best to give Dorian what he wants. Sometimes, that complicates what he wants.

Normally he would jab and tease, mock ponder over the prospect of sucking Bull off or riding him until he is a cursing, gratified mess. Or leave him to his own devices and watch. Something simple and pleasurable, requiring thought only as far as either of them fancies some variety.

Not this time. Grasping the base of a horn for brief support, he leans near enough to rest his heated cheek on Bull's temple. "Let me."

Bull is silent in his watchful way for a moment. Then he kisses Dorian's jaw, a staggered pattern of wet imprints down to his shoulder, before he mutters agreement.

Dorian sighs. He lets his throat work a few times, trying to focus himself only on the here and now, and writes the farewell he could not speak with the touch of his hands and the weight of his limbs, whispering it into the hollow of Bull's shoulder and the angle of his side in murmured Tevene.

The boneless, post-coital lassitude spreads tarrily through Dorian. He arranges himself with his back against a bedpost, knees bent up halfway, protective, in concession to the intractable tightness in his chest.

He fishes up the rope that tied his wrists and runs the woven hemp through his fingers, from the knotted end to the scorched, frayed one. The air is close and heavy, dust and stone, sweat and smoke, the sweetness of the tallow candles.

"In Tevinter they bind the right hands of the couple at the wedding feast." To his satisfaction, he manages to sound as if this were a purely intellectual observation, one he might present over a pint at the tavern.

"Mm-hm?" Bull sprawls, but his hand remains half-curled by Dorian's foot.

"It's tradition. You give your working hand, your... weapon hand, your hand of strength, and join it to your partner's." He has to lever himself from this track of thought before it turns disastrous. "The knot stays on all through the festivities. Terribly inconvenient."

"What if you favour your left?"

"Then you have an easier time getting around at the wedding. Unless your spouse does, too."

Bull laughs. The sound might be tinged with relief. "You're shitting me. No 'Vint I've ever seen would take looking like an idiot at their own party."

"Indeed." Dorian tips his head back against the bedpost, looping the length of rope over his knuckles. "It's just for the ceremony. Makes for a better story if you imagine a couple of supercilious magisters tottering around tied at the wrist for the rest of the evening."

"That is a good one." Drowsy satisfaction vibrates in Bull's rough voice. "The guard's calling second watch. Think that means I'm full up for cultural exchange today."

"Here I was hoping you'd regale me with Qunari bonding rituals." If Dorian could stop thinking--if his tidbits from Tevinter were not laced with unwanted memory and meaning--this would pass for the most common of pillow talks. He prods Bull companionably with his foot. "Ah, well. It might be a very short tale."

"Over breakfast, if I have to." Bull tosses a blanket at Dorian, slides his hand down his calf on the way back, and says, with wry, gentle insistence, "Sleep, kadan."

In the middle of gathering the blanket around himself, Dorian frowns. "I have expressed opinions about Qunlat insults in the small hours, I believe."

He hardly has a leg to stand on when it comes to the employment of native tongues, but he's memorised most phrases Bull throws around in the throes of frustration, passion or a good killing streak. This one is new.

"Yeah," Bull says, a little hoarsely. "Then after a day or ten you've got them figured out. Take it as a challenge, 'Vint."

Slipping down from his huddled position, Dorian abandons all notions of slinking off to his own bed. He'll take this one last moment, to remember, to hold, to puzzle over when he goes. Surely that isn't too much to ask.

Whatever power presides over the implementation of terrible ideas is on Dorian's side the next day. A hunter from a nearby mountain hold brings word of brigands plaguing her settlement, and the Chargers, their stalwart leader included, leap at the opportunity. Dorian excuses himself with slightly transparent mutters of needing to prepare for the high dragon hunt. Bestiaries to browse, protection glyphs to perfect, that sort of thing.

He'll need to make sure that Lavellan receives what notes he's been able to make on the subject. Provisions and a sure-footed horse would also be prudent to have, since he means to head out into the ridiculous surfeit of winter on his own.

His preparations are finished with alacrity. It should be a more troublesome thing to unclasp himself from Skyhold and its myriad minute demands on his time and attention. Or should it? He never meant to linger so.

Naturally he drafts a parting note; it rather is a prerequisite for a stylish exit. Too soon it begins to sprawl and falter, and every blithe turn of phrase rings hollow.

I trust you'll bear my absence. Forgive me if I don't rush back. The weather is so much more agreeable in the north this time of--

He smudges the rest with the side of his hand until only Forgive me is visible.

I am sorry. Wait for me.

At last he drops the torn leaf of paper onto the embers in the hearth. Under whose door would he slide it, anyway? Maybe leave it perched on his writing table or on his chair in the library with studied nonchalance, so the first passing maid or scribe could raise the alarm. The paper flares into fleeting brilliance as the flame eats up his platitudes.

The shadows are purple upon the packed snow, shrouding the castle from the tower tops to the Undercroft, when he makes his way to Josephine's study. Knocking first, he enters wary of his welcome. She has never been his fondest admirer, but she slides a wax-sealed document stamped with the emblem of the Inquisition across her desk to him.

"For your voyage to Cumberland. Ask for Captain de Mesniel in Jader."

"Ah, lady ambassador. So eager to get rid of me."

"I have no such thought, serah." If she--like him--has been up unsleeping, the only signs that betray her are the cooled cup of strong tea on the desk and the faint strain in her voice. "If you are set on leaving, it's my duty to see that you get safely to your destination."

"Your duty to a miscreant Tevinter pariah. I had no idea I had such clout with you. I'd have pressed harder on the library acquisitions."

"Please. Whatever my opinion is, you came to me in confidence." She lays a fresh sheet of paper on her writing board. "I also have a duty to others here. Others who certainly think warmly of you."

Her words settle across his shoulders. Irritably he stiffens his spine to bear their insubstantial bulk. "Right then. I had best be off." His mother didn't raise any philistines, and despite all that he's lost he still has his manners: he dips into his best courtly bow. "Lady Montilyet."

"I will tell them, Serah Pavus." Josephine gives him a look of sloe-eyed sympathy that is as unflinching as it is unbearable. "Go with the Maker's grace."

Dorian closes the door carefully behind him.

Well before the grey and grudging dawn, he rides out of the gate. Being in the Inquisitor's confidence has its advantages; the soldiers on watch accept his departure with scarcely a comment. The snow crackles under the horse's hooves. When the shovelled track peters out, he may have to lead his mount as far as the pass.

He left his words of goodbye smouldering in the fireplace of his perennially chilly room. The only letters he carries with him are tucked into his sleeve under layers of lambswool and leather--Josephine's letter of credit, and the one that chased him into the snow and silence on a northbound journey.

Dorian, it begins, as if his mother were lost on how to address him. It never troubled her before.

I do not know in what kind of health this letter finds you, if it finds you at all. Good money thrown at swift couriers will only do so much.

It seemed clear to me when your father returned that you had made your choice. I am not privy to most of whatever happened between you in Redcliffe.

Is her ignorance spurious or genuine? Very little happened. Clearest of all he remembers the Inquisitor, steel and solace in her hushed timbre, telling him that she had heard enough. The heavy rattle of the inn door slamming behind him. The wind from Lake Calenhad that he drank in like wine after the stifling ambiance of the Gull and Lantern.

He agreed with Lavellan. Almost two years have passed since.

If you have written since then, no word has reached us or those friends of yours in Minrathous to whom I've spoken. But I shall come to my point before I exhaust your patience.

Your father is ill. Whatever it is, it is beyond the healers of any Circle I have been able to ask for favours. You must have your doubts, and I may not entirely blame you. You have my word that what I write is the truth.

Her word, and nothing but her word.

He has not asked for you. Still, it seems proper to me that a son know that his father's time is short. Do with this knowledge what you will.

Perhaps it was that haughty, final note that convinced him of her sincerity. The letter is signed with her name in tall, precise strokes of the quill. He feels the document case, like a hidden weapon, if he allows himself a touch of the absurd, against his forearm.

The air cuts his lungs in a rasping drag of cold as he inhales. It will be a long road home.