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Dorian Pavus, leaned back in the clear, steaming water of the bathing pool, not quite ready to go further into it than the tiled bench along the shallow edge, and listened. Faint splashes of the water, magnified slightly and echoing against the room’s walls and columns, the sounds of the manor even more quiet beyond the doors and changing area, where servants- paid servants, and to the void with what his ‘fellow’ Magisters made of it- were tidying up the robes he had shed.
He found his gaze drifting downward again, to the scarring that laid along his side, low over a hip and down to a line along his thigh, not so visible under the water as otherwise. One his more intimate and personal souvenirs from the Inquisition. Thinking of it that way, inevitably, he smiled, rememberingother scars, on grey fingers and hands that had traced over this set on multiple occasions.
“And now of course I will be getting rather melancholy, because certainly nothing rounds out a day of tiresome verbal positioning and backstabbing like missing a lover.”
He said the words with a twitch upwards to his lips, and listened as parts of them returned from the intricate tile patterns that made the bath so loud if one had company in it.
And then he laughed, which had even more of an echo, as he pictured what the room would sound like, full of drunken mercenaries unwinding after a fight.
Someday he’d simply have to invite the Chargers, all of them, for some manner of reunion- perhaps sooner rather than later. Considering how he pictured the older, more traditionally paid staff that he’d inherited from his father reacting to their presence, it would be worth the visas and paperwork to get them here, the smoothing over of little incidents that would undoubtedly occur as they passed through to reach Minrathous.
He did miss them all, he truly did, and if he considered their reactions to being let loose in the grand estate bath or gardens, it was a bit of a distraction from what, and who, he missed more than he was quite ready to deal with.
Being a mage meant having far too much imagination sometimes, and better to consider the laughter of many than what echoes might be made if it were just himself and his lover having a more private reunion. The sound of Bull swearing when coming, for example, ringing out and how long the vaulted ceiling might keep it alive and going-
And there I’ve done it to myself, but another letter should arrive from him soon, and then- well, we did speak of it, it’s simply a matter of arranging a trip for myself, or a reason for them to come, and with the responsibilities and burdens there must be some reward beyond no longer freezing and sleeping on rocks.
Dorian sunk lower into the water, half-considering his next letter to his former traveling companion and perhaps still lover whenever it could be arranged, and half beginning to cup and curl fingers around his cock. A little ache to the heart, but one tempered by hope and remembering the Tal-Vashoth’s hands and mouth, the Iron Bull letting him know how glad he was that his ‘Vint had survived.
And proving to that only slightly younger yet somehow so much more uncertain him that the scars on his skin were anything but a flaw.