Archive of Our Own

“Sit, Templar, stay. Good boy.”

It wasn’t like Hawke was unaware of what he was doing to the young, armor-clad ghost that all but haunted the shadows of the Gallows courtyard. He’d lean on his staff, watching indignation color pale cheeks and turn the washed-out freckles that dusted the bridge of his nose stark against the pink.

Cullen was Knight-Captain at the time, a gauntleted hand flexing over the hilt of his blade. “I’m not your dog, Ser Hawke,” he’d say. “And you know as well as I do that it's disrespectful to imply such.”

“To the dog, maybe.”

They were both young in the way that men were young before war and old after it, and old in the way that men were old after the first war but young before the second.

Hawke could see the scars of the Fifth Blight on Cullen’s heart the same way he knew the grooves scored into his own—the way the war changed them, the things they lost marked into the fading memory of a home they left behind.

It made it more fun to tease him, to press at the cracks in his walls until he’d give and snap. Fun, was all it was.

Good boy, he’d say when Cullen argued in favor of some measure of peace and security instead of all-out war.

Sit, boy. Play nice, he’d say whenever he’d shake loose the tightly-plastered curls and bare his teeth at one of the trembling, frightened mages dragged back from the caves of the Sundermount.

Stay, whenever Cullen would watch him pass, with Merrill or Anders following close by, and make a step towards Hawke’s heels to ask him a question.

Sit, whenever Cullen didn’t heed the first warning and anchored himself to Hawke’s side to talk. (And good boy when he stopped. It was always good boy when he stopped. Good boy, sit pretty, that’s right when he’d fall back on one foot and all but growl in Hawke’s direction.)

It was heel, boy once.

Just once.

Cullen had done so without question, falling in line at Hawke’s heel with all the coiled rage of a leashed war dog. He was taut, eyes bright like he was waiting for his release word, a single sharp whistle to cut the restraints and set him loose on the blood mages they’d unearthed from yet another Darktown hideout.

Heel, boy once, quickly matched with a deep breath and a soft, slow go on, get them.

It was always meant to be crass, always meant to lean on the raw nerves under Cullen’s skin. He wanted to dig there, into the space between his veins and twist around until he found the sore spots and the bruises. He wanted to press on them and break them up the same way he wanted to keep them irritated and sore.

To call someone a dog in Ferelden walked the line between compliment and insult, each instance hinging on the tone and context. A dog, a bitch, a mangy creature forging for scraps in the alleys was different from a Mabari.

To treat someone, a living breathing person, as one was an entirely different situation. Sit boy, stay, to call him like a Mabari at his heels, to summon him to his side and have him sit and wait—to suggest that something so flawed as a man could ever be as loyal and true as a Mabari—was never insulting. It was sacreligious.

That was what made it fun.

Dig where it hurts, press at the bruise. Call the Templar hound a dog in a way only they would know—Ferelden to Ferelden, a linking bond they could never shake no matter how hard Cullen so clearly wanted to.

The last time it was thanks.

No more good boys, no more sits and stays. It was just thanks, panted out with blood slick on Hawke’s tongue and sweat dripping from his brow. It was with the world stinking of death and the bitter-rich song of Meredith’s corpse kneeling before the Gallow statues like she were pleading for forgiveness that would never come.

Thanks as the memory of Cullen’s back, a slash of gleaming armor and a glinting blade raised in front of him—in defense of the mages and the thieves, in defense of all the things that weren’t people in his eyes, in defense of the until-then indefensible—burned itself into the back of Hawke’s mind.

Hawke was content, that night, as Kirkwall burned around them to never speak another word to Knight-Captain Cullen again.

And he really thought he would.

And, in a way, he was right.

Three years changes a lot of things.

It turns Champion’s into failures, saviors of a city into the people that let it down.

It turns Knight-Captains into Knight-Commanders into Commanders of the Inquisition Forces.

It turns one war into another, and old men into young into old.

Gravel scatters across the top of the ramparts, skittering towards the tall stone parapet as Hawke slides the toe of his boot in idle little patterns. The chill of the stone seeps through his robes, bleeding down into the skin of his lower back as he twists and squints down at the people milling below.

The space beneath him opens into a wider training ground, sprawling and spreading with paired up sets of troops—mages and soldiers learning how to spar and handle themselves against one another. They pull punches in the way that mages and soldiers can. Glancing blows and hilt-blow strikes.

It’s staff training, by the look of it—teaching mages to swing their staves around to use the bladed ends, to get between the cracks of armor and twist, to push their body weight forward and use their leverage more than their strength to topple heavily-armored soldiers.

Staff training and, well, the opposite of staff training. Defense. It’s always defense against magic, though.

“I can see it now. One of those recruits is going to look up and see you lurking like a gargoyle and piss himself.”

“It’s part of their training,” Hawke quips as Varric leans beside him, settling into the space between stones. “Be ready for anything, right? Even lurking mages in the rafters.“

“If you were in the rafters we’d be having a different conversation.”

Hawke hums, kicks a little piece of stone down over the ledge, and looks back towards the horizon. The mountains break against the sky, snowcaps glowing ghastly in the glimmer of the breach.

“Have they made a decision yet?” He asks, glancing back down to where Varric’s begun picking at a stray edge of his sleeve.

Varric’s never been nervous about anything. They’ve done a thousand different things, went a thousand different places. They even faced down Corypheus once already—with fire and lightning then—and he was never nervous.

Now he picks at threads and doesn’t look him in the eye. “Nah. They’re uh…they were screaming it out in the war room. Something about missing soldiers and how to handle the Wardens. I don’t know, I just…I thought having you here would help if we’re going to be fighting that nug-humping freak again.”

“Do you think the nug humping is what did his face like that?” Hawke asks as he looks back down to Varric. One hand rests, loose and easy, on his staff. “Or was it the red lyrium.”

“That or the committing the greatest sin and damning all of humanity thing.” Varric kicks a rock next, too. Hawke likes to imagine they land together, two stones nestled up against one another. “Or the nugs. Those things are mean.”

“I hear you shouldn’t tell that to your Spymaster.”

“That isn’t how I want to go, Hawke, stabbed in my own bed. It’s anti-climatic.”

Hawke shifts, letting the gravel drag into the bottoms of his shoes. “You didn’t just come up here for a chat, did you?”

Varric sighs, that heavy, bone-deep sound that Hawke still isn’t used to hearing. “I volunteered to be the hero retriever. Curly wants to talk to you in his office.”

“You could’ve said that,” Hawke offers. Maker, they’ve gotten old haven’t they? He spins his staff in his hand. “Could’ve sent one of those messengers I see running about. Didn’t have to climb all those stairs yourself. Must’ve been like climbing a mountain.”

“Short joke. Clever. Have any weird demon-fucking nightmares today?” Varric scoffs, venomless and toothless. It makes Hawke huff an amused noise out through his nose. “I wanted to come chat, see how you were holding up here.”

“Didn’t want to tell the messengers that I was here?”

“If people start asking you to sign copies of my book instead of me, I’ll die.”

This time it earns him a smirk. Hawke pushes himself up off the stone and levels himself up with his staff. “Alright. But only because Cullen’s been avoiding me since I got here.”

“Curly? Oh, definitely,” Varric scoffs as he picks himself up next. His hands slide into his pockets, a casually restless gesture. “Do me a favor, try not to kill him? He’s a stick wedged so far up his ass I’m surprised they’re not using him to hold up flags—but he’s useful.”

“I can’t promise anything. I never was good with Templars.”

###

Cullen’s office is quiet, set away from the heart of Skyhold. A meager light filters in from the slender arrowslits, cutting a thin line through the shadow. There’s a warm glow that spills out over it, interlocking and pouring over a cluttered and chaotic mess of a desk.

Hawke never would’ve taken Cullen for a disorganized Commander. Something about the way he’d held himself in the Gallows, standing with his chin level and his eyes hard, it made him seem calm. Collected.

Though, that could’ve just been the antithetical half of Meredith’s manicism. With her stripped away, Cullen seems somehow more and less balanced, a scale constantly tipping from one side to the other without ever properly pouring out.

One of the first things Hawke had noticed upon his arrival, watching Skyhold mill about beneath his perch, was Cullen. The shape of him was almost achingly familiar cut against the anonymous swaths of soldiers gathered there—the same and different all at once. His hair is different, that’s given—combed back and carefully plastered down by some sort of pomade—but there’s something else that pings and plucks at the nerves twisting around Hawke’s spine.

Something in the way he carried himself as Hawke had watched him from the battlements.

He didn’t realize what it was until the door shuts neatly behind him, sinking both men in the tacky darkness of a candle-lit room.

“Thank you for meeting me here, Serah,” Cullen says, standing with his hands braced on his cluttered desk. His armor is different, but Hawke had presumed that would’ve changed. He’s shed the sigil of the Order in favor of something that fit him better—leaving him bereft of the brand that marked him as one of their own.

And, if that first needle-prick instinct is right, it isn’t the only thing they’d left him free of. Hawke takes a deep breath to see if he’s certain, if he’s certain.

And…well. At least he knows Cullen won’t be able to dampen his magic like this. He thinks it for a brief moment before the wash of something else crashes over him, shaped suspiciously like guilt.

“I think we’re beyond the formalities, Commander,” Hawke says, leaning his staff against the wall. Open palms, open hands. It’s always safer that way, Templar any longer or not. “Hawke is fine.”

“In that case, Cullen will do over Commander.”

“Not Knight-Commander?” He asks, taking a half-step closer to shuck off the shadows and move into the dull yellow light. “Is it considered a demotion, then?”

“I’m not a Templar,” Cullen says. “At least I’m not part of the Order. We—you know that.”

An understatement to say the least. To say that Hawke knows what happened is like saying the breach tearing apart the skies is worrying or that Skyhold is a short walk from Denerim. He doesn’t say that.

He just thinks it.

“I was,” is what he says. “And I know, you don’t smell of it anymore. Can we—look, Cullen, can I ask what you wanted me here for?”

Cullen straightens at that, his brows knitting under the weight of whatever questions he has lined up and ready to go that Hawke is already preparing to dutifully ignore. “I called you here to ask something of you. And what do you mean I don’t smell of it any longer?”

Hawke waves a hand. It’s too much to explain to anyone how lyrium smells to mages—how it smells like a lullaby whispered from an unfamiliar mother, like a lightning-crack whisper coiling up around his veins. That he knows the smell of it like he knows the smell of his favorite beer and the wood oil Varric uses for Bianca and the smell of Kirkwall burning. “Ask away. I came here to help.”

“We’ve been having a difficult time determining where best to focus our attentions,” Cullen explains, folding one gauntleted hand over the hilt of his blade—a relaxed and nearly reflexive movement by the look of it. “We have missing soldiers in the Fallow Mire, we have reports of red lyrium in Emprise Du Lion, an Empress to save in Orlais, and…and Corypheus looming above all of it. No one can seem to agree on where to go next.”

There’s a weight to him that Hawke knows. He can feel the ghost of it, sometimes, like a phantom pain. It sits at the shoulders and presses and presses and presses, tearing a thousand different ways in a thousand different places until there’s nothing left of you but scraps and bits being fed to every single hungry dog in the city.

His lips press into a thin line. “And? I came here because I fought Corypheus before, not because I have any intention of leading your Inquisition. And from what I understand you’ve got a very good one of those now. Big hero type, asks a lot of very prying personal questions.”

Another one of those gut-deep sighs. “I’m aware. And the Inquisitor is doing a fine job. I need a voice that understands what we need, and…when that voice is inevitably called to the table to weigh in on our choices, I would prefer it land on my side.”

Hawke blinks. “You came to ask me to agree with you? On what?”

“The Inquisitor is very keen on solving some quandary at a temple in Orlais, but the longer this red lyrium festers the worse it is going to become. You know as well as I do what happens when someone is exposed to it. The red Templars are set up there, and it is vital we eliminate their quarries.” Cullen shifts, examining his shelves with such intent that Hawke knows he isn’t reading a word of them. “And someone we both know is leading them. I’d hope we could garner more information on him there.”

Hawke’s brows knit, a strange dagger-twist sinking through his gut at the idea of any of the faces he’s seen in Kirkwall becoming mangled by the same red stone they’d fought so hard against in the Gallows that night. “Who?”

“You…you might not remember him as well as I do. He and I were close when we were at Kirkwall. Samson? I know you spoke with him on occasion.”

“The beggar?” Hawke nearly gags with it. “The Templar who was ousted for ferrying letters between a mage and his sweetheart? That Samson the—he’d beg for coin in the docks, all but offering to suck it off a mage’s cock? He isn’t leading the red Templars.”

Cullen’s jaw jumps. “He is.” He shakes his head, like he’s trying to shuck off whatever memory or thought is sticking to the inside of his skull.

“That’s absurd, Cullen. You know that.” Hawke feels, rather suddenly, like he’s going to be sick all over Cullen’s floor. His stomach twists and wretches around—caged in the fat and skin of his body. “He’s Samson.”

“Don’t think I don’t know him,” Cullen snaps, looking over at him for the first time since he’d left his desk. “Don’t think I didn’t know precisely who I was looking at the moment I saw him bearing his troops down on Haven. You of all—I thought you would understand.”

It plucks at the nerves in Hawke’s spine, playing over like the strings that bard in the tavern toys with as she hums. It’s like making music, the art of pissing him off. The sort of thing that comes easily to some and requires years of steady and unending practice to others.

Once, Hawke felt it was the latter for Cullen—that years of haranguing him up and down the length of the Gallows courtyard, years of sticking to the backs of his heels and turning his nose up at anything that even came close to stinking of civility for the mages under him, was just a well-practiced ruse to learn how to perfectly play Hawke’s very last fucking nerve.

But it isn’t.

It isn’t practiced, it isn’t malicious, even as it winds Hawke’s jaw tighter and tighter with steadying breath that fails to properly tamp down the irritation building under his skin.

“Why?” He jabs back, taking another step towards the edge of Cullen’s desk. “Why do you think I would understand, Cullen?”

“Because you were there.” Some people don’t need to try to make music. Some people don’t stay up all night rehearsing their finger placement. To some people, it comes naturally. “Because you saw what that idol did to Meredith. It changes people. It changed Samson.”

Hawke brings one gloved finger down onto the desk, nudging a piece of paper out of place ever-so-slightly. He watches as Cullen’s brow knits in irritation. “Samson killed those people at Haven?” He asks, brow raising. “Really?”

“It changed him,” Cullen says. “He’s…he’s different from the man I knew in Kirkwall.”

Sometimes, the world still smells like smoke. Sometimes, when Hawke’s sleeping, all he can hear are the distant cries of innocent bodies, howling while a city block burns.

“Cullen,” Hawke says, as the fight starts to peter out of him. It doesn’t last as long anymore. It’s quick-fire, now. It wasn’t how it used to be.

“Ser Hawke,” Cullen presses, “Varric understands as well as you do, of course, but he has no sway over the other advisors. If anything his input pushes the Seeker into disagreement with him on principle alone. You can change their minds, if you tell them this is the next step they will follow you.”

“I’m not your Inquisitor, Cullen,” Hawke says, feeling that same warning edge flashing up his voice that used to follow the familiar line of his father’s whenever Hawke dared speak too far out of turn. Whenever he dared to reach too far out of place. “Take it up with your boss. I’m sure he’s got a perfectly good suggestion box somewhere. Either that or you can bend him over and shove them right up his—”

“This is not a joke.”

“I don’t think it is,” Hawke says. “But you’re treating a disagreement about war like it’s a petty game. Ask Hawke, he’ll come fix it.” He draws his fingers up the table to catch the edge of a stack of papers—letters by the looks of them—and flicks to send them sprawling and careening over Cullen’s desk.

“People’s lives are on the line, Hawke,” Cullen says, with that hissing sound of his voice shot through his teeth. Poisoned and sharp. Hawke plucks one of the pens from his desk, spinning it in his fingers before tossing it down. “Oh, don’t worry about having an actual conversation with anyone about what you think is important, Cullen, don’t worry about stepping a toe out of line. Hawke will come fix it. We know he always makes his messes but—” This time it’s the heavy metal weight of a seal—boldly and proudly proceeding the crest of the Inquisition. Hawke picks it up, rolling it in his palm once before gesturing out like a baton, “But he always fixes them, doesn’t he? Hawke will come to your Inquisition, Hawke will find out what’s happening with the Warden’s, Hawke will step in and swing his big great magical staff that once-upon-a-time we would’ve locked him a circle for, and he’ll fix it.”

When he swings it again, the metal edge clips the edge of a nearly-empty wine bottle, sending it crashing over the edge and onto the rugged floorboards of Cullen’s office.

Hawke doesn’t wince as it shatters. Cullen does.

“Maker—Fine. Forget I asked—” Cullen steps back from around his desk. His cheeks are ruddy, stained darker than the red spreading across his floor. “I asked you because you had first-hand knowledge about the dangers of red lyrium. You were there when they took the idol from the Deep Roads, you and your brother were the first known victims of someone overcome by its power.”

“Don’t talk about him.” Hawke drops the seal, rounding the corner of the desk to stand in front of Cullen—to look properly up at him, separated by only the river of shattered glass and spilt wine.

Cullen levels his gaze at him, jaw tightening. “Your brother died because Bartrand was maddened by red lyrium. Every single innocent person who died in the attacks at Haven did so under the blades of men plagued by red lyrium. How many more people will you subject to that fate?”

Physicality had never been Hawke’s strongest suit. He wasn’t afraid of it—he could handle a dagger in his palm nearly as well as he could handle the innate magic that bit at his veins. He wasn’t afraid of a scrap, he wasn’t afraid of a fight here and there.

But there’s no amount of practice that truly takes the sting out of a closed-fist blow to someone’s jaw.

Cullen hisses, one gauntleted hand coming up to cradle the side of his face.

“Shut up,” Hawke snarls, with nothing left but the bark in his lungs as his rapidly-bruising fist clenches at his side. “I came here because Varric asked me to, because you’re fighting the creature that was set free by my blood. Don’t ever accuse me of dodging my responsibilities, Knight-Captain. Don’t think I am unaware of the blood on my hands and the pits they had to build for the dead in Kirkwall.”

“Serrah,” Cullen starts, his hand dropping down.

“I said shut up.” The wine puddles under Hawke’s boot as he steps forward, feeling the empty space around Cullen feeling with the heat of his body. “Sit. Down.”

It isn’t playful, like it once was. It isn’t the back-and-forth snapping in the Gallows. It isn’t eye rolling and quaint. It isn’t a game between the two young Ferelden’s stuck in a city-state that hadn’t adopted them yet.

Cullen sits.

He drops down onto a chair covered in scrolls and papers.

Hawke waits for him to speak. He doesn’t.

Quick-fire.

There and then gone.

Hawke flexes, the uncomfortable feeling of his fractured metacarpal joints overwhelms the burning pinpricks that come with casting without a focus. He shudders at the feeling of his bones knitting themselves back together—seaming and rebuilding within his body until the pain vanishes just as quickly as it came.

With a sigh, he extends out his hand.

Cullen looks resolutely away as Hawke’s fingertips trace the bruise on his jaw. Another shudder, another feeling of cold-fire ice dripping through his fingers, and the bruise is gone.

Hawke doesn’t take his fingers back.

Cullen’s facial hair is rough—stubble growing in coarse. His fingers slip just a touch further down the length of his jaw, like he’s testing the sensation of hair against his fingertips—skin against skin if he presses hard enough.

And Hawke doesn’t know why he wants, so terribly, to know how it feels against the skin of his own face, but he does.

There were some evenings, picking his way across Hightown in search of his own front door—half drunk from a night with Varric and Fenris at the mansion—where he’d take a moment to watch Cullen’s patrols.

Monitoring the Templar’s, he’d say to anyone who listened. Not that they cared, really.

It was to watch the order, make sure they weren’t sniffing around him and his walking stick. It was to be safe.

That’s all. It wasn’t ever because of the way he looked bathed in moonlight with his brows forever-creased in worry.

Hawke’s fingers brush under the point of his chin, drawing Cullen’s eyes up towards Hawke’s own. He watches the way they darken in the low light of the office—a place where anyone could spot them, where anyone could walk in.

There were nights that Hawke would never confess, not even in the worst throws of his own nightmares, where he’d lie awake at night and think of moments like this.

Sit boy, stay.

Of Cullen, bent and bowed before him.

Hawke’s thumb sweeps just under one pink, dry lip. Cullen doesn’t so much as twitch. The only sign of time passing, of the reality of the moment breathing in and exhaling out is the faint pinch of his brows—somewhere between confusion and concern.

“Ser Hawke?” Cullen breathes.

“Good boy.” It comes unbidden from Hawke’s lips.

It’s like a droplet of blood in the warm, still waters of a lake. Red pools across the bridge of Cullen’s nose and spreads out at once—seeping down his cheeks and soaking the length of his throat until it’s burning out the tips of his ears and creeping under the collar of his armor.

“I—” Cullen swallows, his throat bobbing under his late-afternoon regrowth mixed with all the places he’d missed while shaving. “Hawke.”

In all of the fantasies he’d never confessed and all of the dreams Hawke left festering and burning with the rest of the Hightown estate, he never could imagine what Cullen would kiss like.

In some, it was hard and demanding. In some, Cullen kissed like he was taking him. In some he kissed like a robbery, tongue sweeping past Hawke’s lips like he was staking claim to the very taste of him. Dreams of kissing in filthy alley’s, in the Gallows, in dirty and dank corners where no one could see their torrid affair.

In some he kissed like a Templar.

In others, he kissed like a knight. Those were dedicated and honorable. In those, Hawke imagined Cullen would sweep him into his arms. That he’d bend Hawke backwards. In those dreams, Cullen had swept him from danger, in those dreams he’d rescued him from a shakedown, from a beating, from any of a half-dozen things.

There aren’t words for how Cullen kisses him in his office in Skyhold.

There aren’t words for the way his breath leaves him—sharp and soft. There aren’t words for how Cullen leans up to meet him, for how Cullen bows to the first press of Hawke down against him. There aren’t words for the way in which Cullen rises from his chair—for the way he backs Hawke against the desk so quick and sharp the desk follows them for a half-inch or so before stuttering to a halt with Hawke pressed against him.

There aren’t words for the starvation that suddenly lights under Hawke’s veins as Cullen’s lips move against his own—slick and warm and perfect.

Cullen doesn’t kiss like a Templar. He doesn’t kiss like a soldier.

A heavy hand finds its way to Hawke’s hip, fitting over his robes and slotting one gloved thumb over the rise of bone that juts up over the top of his trousers. Cullen squeezes him—firm yet gentle—as Hawke lets his lips fall open to the first tentative sweep of Cullen’s tongue.

It isn’t demanding, it isn’t claiming as Cullen pushes past his teeth and follows the line of Hawke’s own tongue. They slide, slick and perfect, together until Hawke’s finger’s find their way up to the clasp of his cloak.

One quick, clever, flick, leaves the fabric tumbling down onto the dusty floor beneath them.

“Maker,” Cullen whispers, as he pulls back.

“Rather fortunately not,” Hawke pants, mouth already tingling with the phantom sensation of Cullen’s lips. “Just me.”

“I—” Cullen’s face screws up and Hawke isn’t certain if it’s the blatant blasphemy or the kissing that’s done it. “Hawke.”

“You got it in two. Very well done.”

Hawke wriggles, his hips still trapped between the sturdy desk behind him and Cullen’s unyielding and immovable shape.

“Hawke.” This time it’s softer. Warmer.

This time Cullen is the one to bend down to meet him.

Hawke doesn’t consider himself a terribly short man. He never has. But Cullen towers over him. And maybe it’s the armor, maybe it’s the way he holds himself like a soldier, but he always has. Hawke doesn’t quite bend beneath him, but he doesn’t shove up against Cullen either.

They meet like a dance, tangled in the center of a battlefield. Warm leather cradles the side of Hawke’s jaw, holding him with a steadiness that roots Hawke to the spot.

Hawke’s fingers slip down the sides of Cullen’s armor, finding the places his breastplate latches together—cold metal on cold leather straps—and plucks at the edges until his irritation starts to get the best of him.

“Let me,” Cullen says, as Hawke’s fingertips start to burn with the itch to just sear them apart. “The Inquisition’s supplies are sparse enough as it is. There’s no point in ruining my armor.”

“And if I want to undress you?” Hawke asks, one brow quirking. “Peel off all…what? Fifteen layers?”

“There’s three,” Cullen says, with that huff of a laugh lingering on the edge of his chest. “And…if…if you’d like.”

Hawke takes the moment to tug at one of the straps. He considers it, briefly, before he leans back on his hands. “Alright,” he says, examining the shape of Cullen’s armor. “You want to be good and strip for me?”

That one makes Cullen flush again. A nice, handsome, red. “I—I mean—”

“You like it when I say that,” Hawke points out, using his hands to leverage himself up so he’s sitting on the edge of Cullen’s desk. “You like when I call you a good boy, don’t you?”

“It’s not…unpleasant,” Cullen admits. “I used to—this is obscene, but when we were in Kirkwall, you would—call me. Like a hound.”

“I did,” Hawke says, watching the way Cullen shifts with an evident mixture of discomfort and arousal. “You liked it, didn’t you?”

“It wasn't unpleasant,” he repeats.

“Filthy,” Hawke teases. “You liked it when I called you like a dog, didn’t you?”

Another deep red spreads over Cullen’s features, tangling up in them like red ribbons tying their fates together. “I did.”

“Do you want me to do it now?” He asks, fingers tapping against the warm wood of Cullen’s desk. “Do you want me to call you a good boy and give you permission to ravage me on your desk?”

“I—I wouldn’t—” Cullen sucks in a deep breath. “If you’d like, Ser Hawke.”

“Strip,” is what he says, by way of an answer. “Like a good boy.”

And Cullen strips.

It’s perfunctory and quick—like all good soldiers—but Hawke can’t stop watching. He doffs his heavy armor first, laying it aside before he starts on the sweat-stained undershirt. It’s a thin grey cotton that he tosses over the back of his chair. His hands drop, scarred and pale and bare to the low lamplight, to the fly of his trousers.

They pause there, like he’s waiting for further instruction.

Hawke tips his head to one side as he watches.

Cullen is all muscle—carefully tucked and carved under layers of skin and fat. He isn’t the sort of chiseled and solid stone like the Qunari with the eyepatch. He’s the comfortable sort, as he stands in the soft glow. There’s a fresh-honey colored scattering of hair across the length of Cullen’s chest, trailing down the center of his neat waist and his stomach—it vanishes somewhere above his navel before reappearing just beneath it in a promising spread that only disappears at the waist of his trousers.

There are scars, here and there. If Hawke tried, he could trace out his armor by the places where it wasn’t. A cut low on his ribs between the straps, something just beside his belly button where the chestplate doesn’t quite reach—buried among the soft-looking hair and the freckles that dot his arms and scattered on his shoulders and clipping at his collarbone.

“Is this—” Cullen pauses to clear his throat. “Do you want me to continue?”

“Don’t mind me,” Hawke says, waving a hand. “I’m admiring the view.”

As it would turn out, Cullen’s blush does spread down his chest.

“How are your knees?” Hawke asks.

Cullen blinks at him. “My knees?”

“Aveline always complains about hers. Something about old injuries and being kicked in them one too many times.”

“The cold weather makes them stiff in the mornings?” Cullen says. “But I’m not unwell.”

“So your knees are fine?”

“...at the current moment, yes.”

“Get on them, then,” Hawke says, leaning his weight back onto his hands. “If you’d be so kind, Commander.”

Cullen lowers himself with just the faintest hitch to his breath.

Hawke shudders at the sight, at Cullen looking up at him with a need-tight expression.

“Hawke,” Cullen says, voice softening. “What would you ask of me?”

Hawke lets his knees fall open, the fabric of his robes looking in the space between them. He’s been making a mess of his smalls since the second Cullen looked at him with those brilliant oak-and-moss eyes.

It’s half-surprising that he hasn’t soaked right through his robes to leave a wet print right between his legs.

Cullen inches forward, hands coming to rest on the thighs of Hawke’s trousers.

It almost isn’t worth it to pretend like Hawke never wanted this—that his pulse doesn’t skip at the sight of Cullen kneeling before him. He drops a hand to thread his fingers through his carefully arranged curls.

“Go on,” he says as Cullen’s breath rolls against the fabric of his thighs. “Show me how good you are with that mouth of yours.”

Cullen’s eyes drop as he slides his hands up the tops of Hawke’s thighs, gathering the fabric of his robes and holding them at his hips. His head bows as he buries his nose into the space between Hawke’s thighs—like a hound seeking out the warm, slick scent buried there.

Hawke swallows the gasp that threatens to tear up from his chest as Cullen breathes him in through the fabric of his trousers. They’re thick enough that Hawke can’t feel the chill of the seemingly permanent late-autumn air of Skywall, but thin enough that Hawke knows when Cullen breathes deep he can smell him beneath the wool and linen.

“There you are,” he purrs, combing Cullen’s pomade loose with each brush of his fingers over the crown of his head. It knocks curls out of place, letting them threaten to break their careful combing and find their natural position coiled into one another. “Go on, have what you like.”

Cullen buries his face closer, letting Hawke feel the rush of air as he inhales against him.

He’d wondered if he would have to explain, or if the rumors and bawdy bar-room chats had bled through to the Order in Kirkwall.

Aqun-athlok, Fenris had called him once, the first time he’d seen what was or wasn’t under Hawke’s robes.

And Hawke didn’t know much about Qunlat, and he still doesn’t, but he believes Fenris. And he knows the guards he’d shagged in filthy alley’s didn’t know Qunlat either, and he knows they didn’t know much beyond the fact that Garrett Hawke had the nicest cunt they’d ever had the honor of sinking into.

To them, that was all that mattered.

And, as Hawke hitches one leg up, draping it over one of Cullen’s broad shoulders, sometimes it’s still all that really matters.

Word gets around when you’re half as good as he is.

“Maker’s balls, Cullen,” Hawke hisses as a wet, searing heat pushes up against him through his trousers. It grinds the fabric of his smalls—soaked to the point of being ruined, now—up into his heat, drawing his eyes half-lidded.

Cullen pauses, tongue still shoved up in him as if he could draw the taste of Hawke’s cunt out from the fabric of him. His eyes jump to meet Hawke’s, concern laced in the tight frown between his brows.

“It’s good,” Hawke assures. “You’re—Maker, it’s just good.”

Cullen nodes minutely and nudges his tongue up against him again, letting spit and saliva start to soak him. He pushes it up, seeking through two layers of fabric in a way that Hawke knows teeters on the knife’s edge between impossible and unlikely.

Hawke swears again when Cullen rolls his tongue in just the right manner, grinding the fabric down against Hawke’s little cock. His fingers tighten minutely and he feels Cullen stiffen beneath him.

“G-good?” Hawke asks, before Cullen groans out in confirmation against him. The feeling of it vibrates through his skin, shuddering through to Hawke’s core as he tips his head back to let a shameless groan free. “Off. Cullen—trousers off. I want your tongue inside me. I want you to eat me until you’re still smelling my come in your beard even after you’ve shaved in the morning.”

Between Hawke’s legs, Cullen bites off a noise as he shifts his hands to fumble with the fly of Hawke’s trousers—it’s an awkward movement before he has them wriggled down, smalls and all, and tosses them aside.

Hawke doesn’t know where they’ve landed. For all he cares they’ve landed in the candle. For all he cares, his clothes could light and burn to ashes around them—take the office and the maps and Skyhold and this whole bloody war with it. He would let it turn to dust, so long as it meant no one would interrupt the way that Cullen’s fingertips brush the tops of his thighs—soft and shivering and covered in thin dark hair.

The fire could swallow the world, turning all of Thedas to a pyre, and as long as Cullen was watching Hawke with careful, dark eyes—Hawke wouldn’t so much as blink.

“Nervous?” Hawke teases, his legs splaying wider. “You’re looking at me like you’ve never seen a man’s cunt before.”

Cullen wets his spit-slick and kiss-pinkened lips. “A man’s? No—I’ve not—” he clears his throat. “I’ve not had the pleasure.”

“Not much different,” Hawke admits, looking down at the patch of thick curls he can see between his thighs. He knows, more less, what he looks like—slick and pink and probably glistening in the firelight considering how wet he feels at the moment. “What’s wrong?”

“I used to be so afraid of you,” Cullen says, as work-hardened fingertips inch closer to him. “You terrified me to my core.”

Hawke shivers at the feather-light touch, foreign and strange under the hands of man Cullen’s size. “I scared you? Maker, you were a Templar.”

“And you’re a mage,” Cullen says, as his fingertips find a soft patch of warm hair high on his inner thigh. “I knew—the whole Order knew.”

“What gave me away?” Hawke asks, leaning his weight back onto his hands. The papers slide under them, but he brushes them aside. “Was it all the times we fought together? Damn, really thought I was better at hiding all the fire I was slinging about.”

“It’s the lyrium,” Cullen says, like a confession. He pillows his cheek on the soft inside of Hawke’s thigh. His stubble scratches at the tender skin. “I could smell it on you.”

“...ah.” Hawke didn’t think it polite to mention all the things he didn’t smell anymore. “Can you still?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.”

Cullen turns his nose into him, burying it closer to the juncture of his thigh. “You smell more like yourself than you do the lyrium,” he assures. “It’s not—that's not why I’m doing this.”

“I’d hope not,” Hawke says, shifting to rest the bend of his knee up over Cullen’s shoulder once more. “I better be more than a lyrium salt-lick for you otherwise I might be a touch cross.”

He feels Cullen’s half-amused huff more than he hears it. The soft breath washes over his feverish mound, drawing another shudder from Hawke’s spine.

“Are you still?” Hawke asks, one hand finding its way back into Cullen’s hair to soothe his now-messy curls back away from his forehead. “Afraid of me, that is.”

Cullen sucks in a shallow, shivering breath. “Yes.”

It feels like a confession. It feels like a sacrament, sins laid bare at Hawke’s feet. Like he alone could anoint him, like he alone could offer the penance needed.

Hawke’s chest aches for a moment. “I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

“I’m glad. I’m sorry you ever were.”

“Do you want to stop?” Hawke asks, his fingers tugging gently at the curls to draw Cullen’s dropped gaze up to him.

“No.”

Hawke nods and leans back to let Cullen begin however he pleases.

It isn’t as quick and sharp as it had been when Hawke was clothed still. Cullen buries his nose into the soft, dampened curls and trails a warm array of kisses down the full length of his cunt. He bows to Hawke like he needs him, like he is the last grounding stake tying him to reality.

Like without him, he’d fall to pieces.

Another kiss drops to the top of him before Cullen first dares to drag his tongue through Hawke’s slick folds.

Hawke swears, softly, under his breath as Cullen’s brow pinches in focus.

Cullen treats this with all the same intensity as Hawke had watched him treat everything else—the battles in the dank, filthy sewers of Darktown, the conversations they’d had in the sunlight of the Gallows, the moonstruck patrols that glittered in eerie quiet.

Hawke wonders, briefly, if Cullen trains his troops with the same rapt attention. If his face sets itself into the mask of focus as he commands them just the same as it does when he lets his tongue lave up the underside of Hawke’s swollen, needy, cock. He wonders if Cullen walks them through their maneuvers, if his hands bear their swords and right their shields with the same care and precision as when he delves deeper to taste the fresh wetness welling and dripping from Hawke’s slit.

He only wonders it for as long as it takes for him to lose himself in the sensation of Cullen’s mouth moving against him, for as long as it takes for Cullen’s tongue to press against him—a constant and building pressure for just a half-breath before he sinks into Hawke’s heat.

Hawke gasps, a filthy sound, as Cullen buries his tongue to the root within him. His nose presses against his skin and heavy, wide hands squeeze around his thighs to keep Hawke steady as he fucks his tongue into him again and again.

Of all the things that Hawke has been—mercenary, thief, Champion, fallen hero—there’s one thing that has been consistent. There’s one thing he’s never changed from title to title, from Ferelden to Marcher.

He’s always been a chatty fuck.

His head whips back as Cullen’s tongue presses up against the walls of his cunt, curling up to play with that spot inside him that makes him thrash and swear. “Maker’s fucking—you perfect thing, you absolute Maker-sent fuck—” He hisses as his fingers tense in Cullen’s hair once again. “Who teaches Templar’s how to fuck like this? Who teaches you how to eat cunt like you were made for this—if I’d known I would’ve dragged you to the estate, I would’ve run off with you, I would’ve broken into the Gallows every single night to ride your face—”

Cullen’s fingers tighten against Hawke, burying himself deeper and closer before he draws his tongue out of him to wrap his slick and strong lips around Hawke’s cock—making him wail with abject pleasure. “Your fingers—fucking—you’re so good, Cullen, you’re such a good pup making me feel so lovely, so perfect so—”

He doesn’t bother to muffle the sound he makes as Cullen releases his thigh and sinks one finger, and then a second, into Hawke’s tight heat. His eyes roll back as the chest of his robes strain with each desperate pant. “Fuck me—Cullen I want—I want to come on your cock, I want you to make me filthy with you, let me walk across Skyhold so full of your come that I’m dripping. I want to sit in those stupid little war meetings with my cunt still shaped like your cock. Have you follow at my heels and sit at my feet so everyone knows how good you are.”

There’s another startled noise between his legs, and Cullen slides off him with a gasp. “Maker!” The lower half of his face glistens in the low light of the lamps, from his nose down to the hollow of his throat where Hawke has made a proper, dripping mess of him. “You’re…that’s obscene.”

“No,” Hawke says. “What’s obscene are the things I’m going to say if you don’t fuck me until I’m walking out of here funny.”

Cullen surges forward, caging Hawke in his arms and pressing their foreheads together. “You—like this?”

“No, actually, Commander, I was thinking we’d actually go for a bit of a walk just like this. Maybe we’ll find someone else’s desk to have a little shag on. Or maybe we could move this outside? Middle of the training ground seems nice this time of year—cocks do well with the cold, right?” Hawke takes Cullen’s sudden closeness as an opportunity to lap one of the beading droplets of his own come off Cullen’s jaw. “Yes, like this.”

“I—I meant—” Cullen looks down between them, where his cock strains out the front of his trousers and Hawke’s so wet he’s a little worried he might slide right off the desk. “I’ve a sheepskin upstairs, if you’d like?”

“Maker,” Hawke says, rolling his eyes and dropping a hand to take hold of the rather impressive bulge between them. Cullen hisses. “Who are you even—nevermind—It’s—the beard, the hair, the—it’s magic and potions and you’re not going to. It’s fine. No little blond-haired mage babies are going to be dropped on your doorstep, I promise. War’s on anyway, they’d hate it here.”

“I want you to be comfortable,” Cullen says, his eyes already half-lidded as Hawke works him through the fabric. He’s heavy in his hand already. Makes him twitch.

“You’re such a good boy,” Hawke says, giving him another squeeze just to feel the twitch of Cullen’s cock under his hand. “I’ll be more comfortable if you fuck me.”

There’s little fanfare to Cullen loosening his fly and drawing himself out of his trousers. Hawke takes the time to feel him, the smooth, welcoming softness to his skin, the heat and weight of him. He toys his thumb over the sticky-slick head, drawing a wanting hiss from between Cullen’s teeth.

Cullen grinds up against him, drawing the heavy, thick length along Hawke’s dripping cunt once, then twice—nudging the thick head up against Hawke’s own small, stiff little cock—before he drags it down to press against his slit.

Hawke’s legs hitch up around his waist, hands finding Cullen’s shoulders to hold himself steady as Cullen keeps one hand down between them and the other stroking large, soothing circles over Hawke’s flank.

“Are you ready?” Cullen asks, pressing just the faintest touch harder to let Hawke feel the thick head starting to push him open.

His breath catches, clipping for a moment behind his teeth as his nails bite into Cullen’s shoulders. It’s been a while since he’s been fucked like this, since he’s been split apart in the stifling and all-consuming cage of someone else's arms. Not since he was caught somewhere between being old and being young. “Come on, now,” Hawke says. “Be a good boy and fuck me like you mean it.”

And he does.

Maker, he does.

Cullen sinks into Hawke, splitting him with a shuddering and lung-squeezing sigh that Hawke doesn’t know if it’s come from himself or from Cullen or from something, somewhere, far away.

And it doesn’t matter, really. It doesn’t matter who’s panting in another’s ear, it doesn’t matter who is groaning, wild and free, or who is whispering another’s name just as desperately and pleading into the other’s sweat-slicked skin.

All that matters is the sound of the desk scraping across the floor, the papers scattering off the surface, bottles and pewter mugs tumbling down and clanging onto the floorboards. All that matters is the slick sound of skin meeting skin and the obscene noises that come as Cullen fucks into Hawke again and again and again—shoving so deep he swears he can feel his cock in his fucking lungs.

Hawke’s fingers scrabble over the sweat-slicked skin of Cullen’s shoulders, digging for something to anchor himself to as Cullen’s cheek scrapes across Hawke’s own. He can feel the welts already promising to rise in the wake of his hands, marking Cullen for at least a little while as his-his-his. His in all the ways he couldn’t be before, his in all the ways that he wasn’t, his in all the ways that he can never be again.

His, if only for a moment and only like this.

His and his and his and his as he pants out Cullen’s name on a rising and cresting peak that feels like the whip-wild call of magic pulsing through his veins.

Somewhere, between the pleading and the panting, he manages a question and Cullen complies, drawing a hand off the desk to slip between their two slick and flushed bodies. His thumb finds Hawke’s cock without pause, brushing against him in tight, slick circles to the beat of his hips and it’s all he needs.

It’s all Hawke needs to snap forward, shoving over the ledge of control and restraint.

And he feels Cullen’s tight-leashed discipline snap next.

Hawke seizes around him as he feels the white-hot sparks burst through his nervous system. Sometimes, he wonders if that’s what it feels like to properly lose control. He used to wonder if this is what it's like to fall from grace.

It isn’t. Hawke knows what it’s like to fall. He knows what it’s like to land, broken and bloody, on the stone and sand.

It was never as good as it is to feel the hot rush of Cullen’s release flooding inside him. It was never as good as it is to feel himself arch and press sweat-slick chest to sweat-slick chest and hear the way his name sounds shattering over the bow of Cullen’s ecstasy.

Cullen’s hips crash into Hawke’s once, twice, and a third time for good measure—until his come wells up and spills from where they’re joined. Hawke shudders as he feels the adrenaline start to burn itself out of his veins. Quick-fire. Like everything else.

He sinks down, cheek to cheek with Cullen, until he’s panting down against his ear—scattering a few idle kisses here and there.

It’s somewhere between a breath and six hours later when Hawke finally peels himself off him. He leans back, wincing as Cullen slips out of him.

“Fuck.” Hawke drops a hand between his thighs, dipping his fingers into the mess left behind. “Maker, why didn’t we ever do that before.” Cullen clears his throat, still nudging his cheek up against Hawke’s. One hand falls to stroke the outside of his thigh, warm and affectionate despite the incoming chill. “We—you were an apostate. I was a Templar. We couldn’t.”

“We absolutely could’ve,” Hawke says. He drags his own hand up to scratch gently over Cullen’s jaw. “I’m sorry, by the way. I don’t punch people often.”

“I can tell,” Cullen says, turning his nose into Hawke’s beard. “It was awful.”

“Hey,” he protests.

“It’s true. Hardly felt it.”

“Don’t make me use the Mabari-training voice on you again.”

Cullen’s hand flexes against Hawke’s thigh and Hawke doesn’t need to look at him to know he’s flushing again. “If…if you were so inclined to do so. I wouldn’t protest.”

Hawke turns just enough to eye the ladder. “Is that your room up there? I think we have a bit more time before someone comes looking for us.”

“Is that an order?” Cullen asks, with a faint teasing edge to his voice.

“It can be,” Hawke says, fingers combing through the sweaty curls at the back of his head. “If you know how to ask.”

“Yes, sir.”