Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I still think you’re being ridiculous,” Iron Bull says around a mouthful of ale. Somehow he’s managed to not laugh even a little bit, even though if their positions were swapped Cullen would most assuredly be laughing at himself. Just as soon as he gets over this feeling of overwhelming dread. 

“You don’t understand… She was very upset,” Cullen mumbles into his own, mostly untouched, mug. Ale isn't his typical drink of choice, nor is drinking much at all, truth be told. He had only even ventured into the Herald’s Rest in search of a bottle of wine to avoid running into Leliana in the main hall. The spymaster would have taken one look at him and read every tense line in his body and so, naturally, he went for option two. 

What he neglected to remember was the Iron Bull’s somewhat permanent inhabitation of the bottom floor of the Rest. Nothing escaped the Qunari’s eyes, let alone the rare sight of the commander in the tavern seemingly of his own volition. 

“I saw the boss earlier,” Iron Bull had begun conversationally. “Before she headed out with the others. Funny - it looked as though she’d been crying.” 

And that is how Cullen finds himself wheeled into a corner with a mug of something most assuredly foul and an overly chatty Qunari spy looming over him. 

“Whatever you did, just apologize,” Bull says wisely as he takes another hefty swig. “Grovel at her feet for a bit, get a bit of flowers together, and you’re good to go. Women like that sort of stuff.” 

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Cullen grumbles before he can stop himself. The last thing he needs is Bull looking into things decidedly not his business, and now he watches with annoyance as the Qunari’s good eye widens with interest. 

“You know,” Bull begins after a long moment and Cullen bites back a groan. “It’s your private affairs–” 

“It is.” 

“–and the Inquisitor doesn’t like when I snoop–”

“Nor do I, if it matters to you at all.”

“But this is the first sort of fight the two of you have gotten into, right?”

“We’re not fighting.” Which is a lie. He doesn’t bother to ask how the Qunari could possibly know that. It seems that as much as they thought their relationship had remained private for those early months, it seems neither the Inquisitor or her commander were quite as subtle as they believed. “It’s not - I don’t know why I’m even talking to you about this. It’s none of your business!” 

Bull leans back in his chair, and the wood creaks ominously under his weight. Clever, Cullen thinks, for Bull to stick them in this particular corner where they are mostly hidden from view by the corner of the stairs, and what little of Cullen could be seen is blocked by the Qunari’s broad shoulders. 

He isn’t scared of Bull, far from it, and Cullen lifts his chin to stare down the Qunari with a scowl. 

“Okay, so clearly you’re upset too,” Bull points out after a tense pause and Cullen feels his cheeks flush red. “I get it. We’re not exactly friends. But if you want…you can tell me.” 

Cullen tries and fails to hide an incredulous laugh and finally takes a mouthful of his ale. It is indeed rank as it sets the back of his throat aflame in an instant. Thankfully, he manages to resist a cough, something he figures would earn him little respect from the mercenary sitting across from him. 

“I’m quite alright, thank you.” And now Cullen makes to stand up, intending to leave before this conversation devolves any more. But the look Iron Bull levels on him is enough to stop him in his tracks and he makes no effort to shift so that Cullen can step around him. 

“And you haven’t been sleeping,” Bull considers, stroking his chin. 

Cullen’s eyes narrow with suspicion. “Been watching me, haven’t you?” 

“I watch everyone,” Bull says pleasantly and perhaps he should have expected that. 

“Lyrium withdrawal is a bitch, isn’t it?” he murmurs next, and Cullen drops back into his seat with a thud. 

“How did you–” 

Bull taps the side of his nose as he offers a wry smile. “Ben-Hassarath, remember?” 

“You can’t–” This is not how Cullen expected this night to go. So much for retreating back to his office to feel sorry for himself over a wine-sodden nightcap. Instead, he’s trapped here with quite literally the last person at Skyhold that he wants prying into his relationship with the Inquisitor. 

Except perhaps Varric. Damn dwarf would have a book written about him before sunrise. 

“Can’t what?” Bull considers him. “Can’t tell anyone? Don’t worry, that’s not exactly my style. I happen to be on your side.” 

Cullen has no response for this and instead takes another furious sip of his ale. It goes down no easier than the last.

“I know it’s easy for me to say,” Bull says slowly, running a long finger around the rim of his tankard. “But there’s nothing to be embarrassed about here. I can tell you something embarrassing about me, if it’ll make you feel better. Let’s see, there was once this bird in Antiva, man she did not like it when I took off my—” 

“Thank you, Bull!” Cullen interrupts hurriedly, not even daring to wonder where that particular story was going. “That’s quite enough!” 

Bull shrugs one meaty shoulder. “Probably not relevant to your problem anyway. Listen, Cullen–” And now he drags his chair even closer to the other side of the table with a scraping sound that rings about, crowding the commander into the wall as the Qunari stares at him. His gaze, even with one eye, is piercing. “I’m not going to make you tell me anything. But if anyone needs a sounding board to work through their issues, it’s you. I remember Haven and what an asshole you were all the time. That was the lyrium talking. Now you’ve got that same damned look on your face, and I don’t want to have my mornings interrupted by whining rookies that you’ve got running laps around the grounds at the ass crack of dawn all because you pissed off your girlfriend.” 

Cullen sets his jaw, rather taken aback by the fierceness to the Qunari’s words; this, seemingly, is Bull’s intended effect as he settles back into his chair looking more than a little self-satisfied. 

“So,” Bull offers after a stretch of painfully awkward silence. “If you want to talk, I’m all ears.” 

“You’re Ben-Hassrath,” Cullen tells him stiffly. Beneath the table, his knee is starting to bounce in a way it rarely does. The Order trained its officers out of many of their ticks—yet not all for him, it seems. “My private life doesn’t belong in a report.” 

“You think I put everything in my missives?” Bull waves a careless hand. “Nah, they don’t care about you and this. And even if they did…” He makes a funny little bobbing motion with his head as he thinks it over. “...I like you alright so far, so I’m going to give you one free conversation. For the next five minutes, pretend I’m not.” 

“Pretend you’re not Ben-Hassrath?” Cullen asks dubiously, and Bull shrugs again. 

“I didn’t say it would be perfect,” he admits. “But you’re welcome to try.” And then he folds his arms across his chest and looks at Cullen rather expectantly. 

It had been impossible, before, to explain this to her. To even know where to begin with untangling the mess and cobwebs and chains that is the inside of Cullen’s mind. Every time it came up, he would turn the words over and over to himself, memorizing where to inflect, where to pause, what to say if she says this so that when he brought it up, he would be ready. But every time he went to do it, the words faltered.

But, perhaps this might be easier. It’s true that Bull is not a friend, but he’s also not an enemy, not yet. And whatever reservations Cullen has about cracking himself open for an openly confessed foreign spy are quickly dashed by the knowledge that whatever secrets Cullen choses to share, the Iron Bull surely already knows, or would not stop until he found out. 

That, and Bull is…knowledgeable, to say the least, about the particular matter Cullen is parsing through. 

“Maeve and I are…together,” Cullen begins, keeping his voice as low as he dares even though their little corner of the tavern is blissfully empty. Still, he knows Sera lurks in the top floors here, and scratch what he thought before– that is the last person at Skyhold he wants prying into his relationship. 

“We’re together,” Cullen repeats, and now he can feel the sweat dripping down the small of his back. “And it’s…nice. It’s really nice. I’ve never had - not like this - and she’s just–” 

“She’s Maeve,” Bull says knowingly.

“Exactly!” Cullen takes a deep breath, because it’s been a while since he did that, as he frantically runs through what to say next. He’s not exactly sure how to put this all into words; he hadn’t known with her, but maybe with someone else… “She’s - she’s everything . But - but there’s this thing - Maker’s breath.” 

“I’m listening,” is all Bull says. He’s still looking at Cullen, that knowing little gleam in his eye that Cullen absolutely hates. And so he seizes the opportunity to bring his gaze to the ceiling and not feel even a little bit bad about it. 

“I can’t,” Cullen grits out all at once, and maybe this is where he expires on the spot, right here in this tavern on a mountain at nine bells on a fucking Tuesday night. “Have sex with her. Or I can - we have - I just–” He balls his hands into a fist on the table, and his skin scraping on the wood stands out to him in the sudden suffocating silence. 

Bull scratches his chin. “What, you can’t get hard?”

Impossibly, Cullen flushes an even darker shade of red. This seems to be answer enough for Bull, who remarks not unkindly, “You know they’ve got herbs for that, right?”

“I know that,” Cullen snaps, and then catches himself when a trio of soldiers on the far end of the room glance over to them. “It doesn’t always - it’s the lyrium, or at least the - the withdrawals.“

Lyrium has taken much from him, the withdrawals even more. In some tucked away corner of his brain, Cullen has made an absent note of his general disinterest in sex these last few years, how even touching himself brings little pleasure. But Maker how he aches for Maeve, perhaps more than he’s longed for anything in his entire life. The first time he followed her to her chambers, lips already kiss-swollen like some lovesick teenager, he had been so ready, so desperate for her as she unlaced his breeches—and then watched as her face twisted in confusion when she found him half limp. 

She’s understanding. More than understanding about that, really, if Cullen is truthful. In these moments he flushes hot with frustration and embarrassment until she kisses him softer than he could ever possibly deserve, and she lets him touch her still. If lyrium withdrawals were the only barrier here, perhaps he could wrap his mind around it. 

But that’s not all. 

“I have no problem doing...that…with her…” Cullen finally forces, eyes still locked on the planks of the ceiling even as his face burns with mortification. “But when she wants to…do things…to me…” 

“Ah.” It’s infuriating how much understanding the Iron Bull packs into such a little sound. 

Cullen keeps his eyes on the ceiling, one, two three, and then chances a look across the table. Bull hasn’t moved, not even a little bit, just sitting there with that same thoughtful look on his face. 

“And I don’t know why,” Cullen continues, shame curdling even more when it comes out as a strangled whisper. “She’s - she’s - I like her. I like being with her. I like thinking about being with her. But when she wants to - when she tries to return - I can’t. I freeze. And I’ve pushed her away because of it.”

Her. Falling away from him with a gasp of surprise. Her gaze. Shock, confusion, fear, hurt. 

“Did you just–”

Bull considers this for a moment. And then, “How long have you two been together?” As if he doesn’t already know. 

“Five months, two weeks, and three days,” Cullen says immediately and watches as Bull’s brows raise. 

“And you just… like her.” 

“Well, I–” That’s another thing that’s been brewing inside Cullen for quite some time, made only worse by the life-upending horror that had been seeing Maeve fall into the Fade at Adamant. He’d been so sure he’d lost her then, for whatever else could have caused the yawning chasm behind his breastbone, the pain under his skin, the scream trapped behind his teeth. 

He’d been so sure he’d lost her then, without ever telling her…

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Cullen finally says. “I mean, I want to talk about it. But not, uh, not with you.”

“Fair enough,” Bull chuckles. “So–” He leans forward over the table so much that Cullen can smell the sour drink on his breath. “You’ve got a problem with Maeve fucking you.” 

Cullen chokes on his ale and this time he really does dissolve into a fit of coughing. The Qunari waits patiently as he fights for breath through the fiery spit that’s erupting in his throat, before he’s finally able to gasp out “It’s not - let’s not use - we’re not trying to do… that .” 

“Control,” Bull offers as if Cullen hasn’t said anything at all. “You like to be in control of, well, everything. Plenty of soldiers do. Plenty of people like to be in control in bed. Nothing wrong with that.” 

“It’s not control,” he shakes his head. “At least, I don’t think it’s control. It could, of course, be that. But, eh, it’s more…” Cullen falters, the practiced script falling away from him at the dubious look on Bull’s face.

Bull purses his lips. “Do you trust her?” 

“Of course I trust her,” Cullen insists, outraged a little that Bull would be so quick to assume otherwise, but the anger quickly dies when Bull gives him another of those damned patient looks.

“She is,” Bull says quietly, still hunched over the table towards the commander. “A mage. I ask again, do you trust her?” 

Cullen flinches back, his armor meeting the wall behind him with a soft thud. It feels wrong to ever think of Maeve in the same context of the mages in Kinloch or Kirkwall. He had been frightened of them, he can see that clearly now. Other templars would readily volunteer to escort mages to and from their quarters after hours, some even stepping forward on their own. But Cullen would always take at least two others with him, even for the meekest of mages. It was fear that drove him to such paranoia and to Meredith’s den, to more lyrium to drown out the nightmares and to a detached coolness he knew scared the mages in turn. 

The maleficar of Kinloch: cutting, burning, mocking. Maeve, rose-scented bathwater and spindleweed under her fingernails and soft hands in his hair at the end of a long day.

It's silly, when he really thinks about it. He's trusted her with more of himself than he has ever given another person, two decades of keeping his mouth shut wiped away in an instant with the first knock on the post outside his shoddy tent in Haven. But the moment she wants to put her mouth on his cock is when he freezes up. Maker's breath. 

Cullen scrubs a hand over his face and thinks–thinks of her, who even when she is exhausted from her own work will carve out time for him and her alone. She who will do things sometimes that are achingly sweet in a way he’s only ever seen with his own parents as a child, like bring him back little pastries or books on Ferelden mythology, just because she was thinking of him. Or, now that their courtship is more or less public, she will be far less hesitant amongst their friends to call him “darling” and “dear” and, of course, “duck,” a funny little Marcher pet name she bestowed upon him one day before they even starting seeing each other. Cullen hasn’t had any want to change it, no matter how many teasing looks he gets from Varric.

“I trust her,” Cullen says firmly, perhaps more firm than he’s ever been about anything in his life. “Whatever reservations I have with magic, she bears none of them.”

“Alright then.” Bull scratches his chin as he considers the same bit of ceiling Cullen was just staring at. “So, control.” 

“I just told you it’s not–” Cullen clamps his mouth shut when Bull looks back at him, only a little unimpressed. 

“When you have sex with her,” Bull says mildly, as if he and the commander are discussing the weather rather than the most intimate relationship Cullen has ever had in his entire life. “You take the lead, I’m guessing. And when she wants to take the lead, that’s when you have a problem.” 

Cullen isn’t quite sure he’s able to articulate just how appealing the idea of submitting to Maeve is, at least when he turns the idea over in his head in a sort of abstract, clinical manner. There’s even less of a chance he’s going to admit that to Bull, how he lies awake at night thinking of her above and around him with all her strength and grace. 

Bull is still looking at him, long fingers on the rim of his mug as he waits the commander out. 

“I want to be present in those moments,” Cullen finally says in a low voice. He runs his fingers over the grain of the table before him, frowning when his rough nails catch on the wood. “But it’s like my mind becomes…no longer in my body.” 

“Have you talked to her?” 

“Of course we talk!” Cullen scoffs, suddenly angry as he stares fiercely at Bull. “We have to talk whenever - whenever I can’t get my body to work right and I just don’t know what the hell is wrong with me–” 

“Have you talked about Kinloch?” Bull asks quietly and the bottom just about drops out of Cullen’s stomach. 

A noose, tightening. Chains around his wrists to bind, to hold, to imprison . 

“You don’t know anything about Kinloch,” he manages to bite out behind bared teeth; bile rises in his throat, churning, burning, roiling. “You don’t know anything about me, how fucking dare you–” 

“Templar records are surprisingly easy to track down,” Bull interrupts. He’s barely moved from his position at the table. To any unassuming eyes, they might be two friends sharing a drink, instead of whatever...whatever this has turned into. “An entire Circle falls in Ferelden to blood magic, saved by the Hero of Ferelden… Someone didn’t try hard enough to bury that.” 

“No one buried it,” Cullen says, and he feels numb even as something in him catches on a memory, dragging in the dirt behind him until he can no longer carry it, just waiting for him to stumble. “I didn’t - no one talked about it. It just was a part of me. It is a part of me.” 

Bull raises his eyebrow. “Seems like a good place to start,” he says, but his voice is painfully soft. 

Cullen exhales in a long, low rattle and they sit in the corner for a long time in silence, the ale burning a hole in his belly all the while. 

Predictably, he spends the next week decidedly not thinking about it. Instead, Cullen fills his days with meetings and drills and research into templar supply lines. When he sleeps he does not dream, yet when he wakes he is drenched in sweat, fingers convulsing in the sheets and a garbled scream trapped behind his throat. 

He thinks, often, of the lyrium sitting behind lock and key right here in the keep for their mages and former templars. It would be too easy to give the order for a philter to be brought to him, to feel that cool song slip down his throat. But these thoughts Cullen puts away with no small amount of effort, and carries on the work. 

On the fifth night, he spends it staring at the summer night sky through the hole in his ceiling. As a child his mother often took Cullen and his siblings into the hills around their farm to count the stars, and now his eyes trace Visus and Fulmenos. Judex, the Sword of Mercy, twinkles into existence to the left: the symbol of guilt. He swallows around the knot in his throat. 

No more running. 

And then he goes down to his desk, pulls out a fresh leaf of parchment, and pens a resignation letter. 

Maeve returns from Ferelden in the late afternoon of the sixth day after his talk with the Iron Bull. She cuts a slim figure against the summer sky as her small party treks up the mountain roads, tiredly slumped on her horse. He paces the battlements, hands tucked behind his back to stop their shaking. He’s never well when she’s away, fearful with every raven that arrives it will bear news of her death. And with the way they parted before, he worries even more that her anger persists. 

He meets her in the courtyard to help her dismount, though he knows she is more than capable of doing it on her own. Still, she offers a small, hesitant smile that surprises him. He tries to return, and finds only a writhing mass of anxiety in his belly. 

“Welcome back, Inquisitor,” Cullen murmurs, horribly aware of Blackwall and Dorian’s gazes on him. They know , he thinks, for what else would cause that hard judgement. 

He tears his eyes from them when a hand lands on his shoulder.  “Come find me later?” She asks and he nods wordlessly, hoping the misery does not show in his face too badly. 

Later, he will be ashamed at his avoidance of her. Stacks of reports go rifled through and marked as he paces his office, headache drumming the back of his eyelids. It’s not until the candles burn low and his eyes grow tired that he finally admits it’s time to stop this cowardice. She deserves better than him. She always has. 

“Aimery?” He calls, just when his captains and lieutenants are filing into his office for evening reports. The young man’s head lifts from his careful copying out requisition requests. He’s one of Josephine’s; a good lad and an even better secretary. 

“Take this to the Inquisitor’s office, if you please? And then finish your night.” 

“Of course, ser!” 

Cullen breathes a soft sigh of relief as the boy hurries off, letter held in his office as delicately as if it were gold. Little does he know…

Rylen, Wolffe, Fallon, and Clarke are looking at him expectantly to begin the meeting, and so he sits at the desk, stares down at a map, and desperately tries not to think about how this will be one of his last meetings with them. 

This he will miss. Cullen has spent the better part of his life training and living with other soldiers, first as an initiate, then as a junior officer in Ferelden, and finally in Kirkwall. There is a fierceness to the work that he has always enjoyed. Moderating frustration, commemorating success however small it may be. He remembers his early steps in training; the joy at earning his place amongst his colleagues. Even in the brief days between quitting the Order and being recruited into the Inquisition, he had convinced himself to join the Wardens. To make some good from his life after so much destruction. But now the Wardens are at the mercy of Corypheus and Cullen has no interest in becoming another madman’s puppet. 

What will he do now that he’s left the Inquisition too? Cullen isn’t sure it matters anymore. Alas, that will be a decision for tomorrow. He still needs to figure out how to tell the rest of the advisors of his early departure, or perhaps the Inquisitor will dismiss him on the spot and relay his sorry tale to the rest? 

It’s not long until his decision is taken from him. Fallon is just wrapping up their summary of current training progress when the door to the office bangs open. They all jump, springing to attention with hands flying to swords, but pause when they see who has unceremoniously barged in. 

Maeve stands primly silhouetted against the torchlit castle, and in her hand she holds a folded bit of parchment Cullen recognizes as the letter he sent to her not an hour ago. 

A block of ice slides into his chest.

“My apologies for interrupting, soldiers,” Maeve says pleasantly. Her eyes are fixed on Cullen, blue chips of unreadable marble. “Mind if I borrow Commander Rutherford for a moment?” 

Rylen hesitates, shooting a nervous glance to Cullen before he clears his throat and murmurs, “Of course, Inquisitor. Ser.” He offers a short bow to the two of them, then promptly hastes for the door, the other officers on his heels. There are a few seconds of heavy, awkward quiet until the door clicks shut and it is just Cullen and Maeve alone. 

The silence is heavy, cloying. 

“A very curious thing happened to me just now,” Maeve begins conversationally. “I was just sitting down for my evening meal, wondering where in the world my darling man has been all day when he knows I’ve just arrived back, when what should come to my office but this fascinating piece of literature?” 

She holds up the letter, and a second realization strikes Cullen like a bolt of lightning. She is furious, perhaps the angriest he has ever seen her, and this must the sort of fear her enemies must feel before she incinerates them with a snap of her fingers.

“Inquisitor–” 

“Don’t bullshit me with that,” she says through gritted teeth, and now she draws herself up, all five-feet-nine-inches of her, as she stalks slowly towards him, almost catlike with her movements. “What the hell is this?” 

“I think you’ll find it’s perfectly clear–” 

“You think I would allow you to resign?” 

“ Allow me?!” Cullen gapes at her, completely aghast. His temper, one he has fought tooth and nail to keep in check over the years, rises sharply. A deficit of sleep over the last week drives him to a harsher tone quicker than he might normally speak. “You cannot keep me here if I wish to go!” 

“No,” she says coolly, regarding him with obvious displeasure. “If you had proper cause to retire before our mission was complete, then it would be evaluated as is typical for all senior officers. But you do not have cause or reason, and therefore your request is denied .” 

“Proper cause?” Cullen sputters out. ‘I don’t have a proper cause? I harmed my commanding officer. Men have been executed for less!”

“Perhaps amongst the Templar Order that was a more common occurrence,” Maeve drawls and he cannot help but flinch. “But there are no executions here. And there will certainly not be for this.” And then she sighs, and rubs the bridge of her nose between two fingers. 

 Torchlight spins her copper hair into liquid flame, smooths some of the lines on her face and carves out others. She looks utterly exhausted, and then Cullen takes a deeper look. Her clothes are rumpled when she typically is immaculate, wrinkled wool and hastily tied laces on her jacket that threaten to come undone any second. The shadows under her eyes are present as they always are but against her pale skin they hang particularly heavy. Has she been crying, or is it just the fatigue from long days of travel that has her eyes so red?

“This isn’t how I wanted this to go,” Maeve mutters into her hands. “You weren’t supposed to…you weren’t supposed to quit , Cullen.” 

His mouth works silently for a few moments, open and close and open and close, before he manages to steal his nerves. “I have little choice in the matter,” Cullen says stiffly. “You are a fool if you do not take it seriously.” 

“Oh I am taking it extremely seriously,” she snaps, settling her hands on her hips as she glares once more at him, her mouth drawn into a tight line. “And my decision is final.” 

“You’re making a mistake. I cannot be–” 

“What? Trusted?” 

Cullen springs to his feet, his chair toppling backward to clatter against the wall. “Yes! Maeve, yes! Is that what you want me to say?!” He very nearly seizes handfuls of his own hair out of frustration as his feet carry him around the desk, closer to her with frantic energy. “If I cannot control my own actions then you must relinquish me of my duties and entrust them to someone who can .” 

She’s shaking her head. Maker, how can she of all people not understand? “It doesn’t warrant a removal. It’s only a–” 

“I Smited you!” Cullen bellows. An ink well on his desk wobbles and then falls with a shatter across the floor. 

Her mouth clamps shut at once, color rising to her cheeks and across her ears. Cullen’s chest heaves, his face burns, and the throbbing in his temples is so great he’s convinced that it will burst any second now. 

“I Smited you,” he repeats, quieter now but no less incensed. “In the midst of…extreme intimacy. It is unacceptable. It cannot happen again, it will not. That is why I must leave.” 

Maeve frowns at him, silent for a few long moments, before she asks, “Would you like a cup of tea?” 

Cullen blinks, wind taken out of his sails at the sudden change of conversation. “What?” 

“Tea, dear. I’m making tea and asking you if you would like a cup,” she says, rolling her eyes at him as she crosses to the little cabinet where he keeps a battered tea kettle and boxes of tea leaves. “You have some of that Treviso blend left that Josephine got you for your birthday, don’t you?” She is already measuring out the leaves for the pot and igniting a rune at its base with a touch of her hand to heat the water. 

“I don’t want tea.” 

“Suit yourself, though you might reconsider. You look terrible.” 

“Enough,” Cullen growls, balling his hands into fists at his side. “Maeve, you cannot be serious. Last week, I-I–”

“I’m not ignoring last week,” she cuts him off as he begins to stammer, mind too caught up in the what and the why and the I can never let this happen again. She turns back to him, a cup of hot tea in her grasp. “Sit, why don’t you.” It is not phrased as a question.

He chews on his lip, not sure he will be able to get out of this one easily, and gingerly settles back down into his chair. Maeve sits across from him for the first time in months, not bothering to drag her chair closer to his as she usually would, or perch on the side of his desk until Cullen gives up and pulls her into his lap. Even in her own office with its formal hard-backed chairs, she prefers to balance on his thighs as they comb through reports together. Highly unprofessional, she once remarked, not that either of them particularly cared about professional decorum behind closed doors. 

But now she might as well be on the other side of Skyhold. 

“I’m not ignoring it,” Maeve repeats as she drops a slice of lemon into her cup. “I’m upset. Very upset, actually, at your letter. I don’t see any reason for you to resign. Last week did not involve your duties as commander of this army in any way. They were entirely personal.” 

He opens his mouth in warning protest but she’s already continuing. “Furthermore, I was more startled than hurt by the Smite. It’s been many years since I’ve felt the full effects of templar abilities. Yours are…diminished significantly without lyrium. I’m more concerned about, well, you .” 

“I’m fine,” Cullen replies automatically, even as his stomach turns over uncomfortably. 

“No you’re not,” she says simply. “You’re not alright, Cullen. After I left I thought a lot about what happened, and I don’t know… Did I catch you at a bad time? Was the pain worse and I just didn’t see? Did I not realize you were hurting? ” Her cool mask fractures a little, anguish appearing in her eyes, and Cullen itches to touch her. He keeps his hands bolted in his lap. 

“You’re not to resign,” Maeve says, and her voice is very firm. “But if you require time away from Skyhold, I would grant that in a heartbeat.” 

“I don’t want a break.” 

“But you’d leave the Inquisition.”

“To protect you, yes!” 

“You didn’t hurt me, Cullen. At least not physically–” Maeve blows hair out of her face with a frustrated huff. “There’s this closed door that you won’t open for me. You keep bottling up whatever’s in there with you more and more, and then–and then it doesn’t have anywhere to go so it explodes. I’m not a mind reader.”

“I know you’re not,” he croaks, anger deflating out of him as quickly as it had come.

“I don’t need your protection,” she says, still frowning across the desk at him. “But I do need your trust if we’re going to work through whatever this is.” 

Cullen drags a hand over his face, cold fingers dragging at his tired eyes. “What happened last week…it can never happen again, Mae. I won’t let it happen again.” 

“So talk to me,” she whispers, and now she sets her mostly untouched cup of tea on the desk so she can reach out to offer her hand to him, palm up on the desk. Andstraste preserve him, he meets her halfway, tangling his fingers with hers in an instant. 

“When you’re ready… I’m here. I’m not afraid. And if you come to realize that you don’t - that this isn’t something you want, then that’s alright. We can - we can figure that out too.” 

Cullen notices the way she catches herself mid-sentence. Wonders hopelessly what it is she was going to say. If you don’t want me. But he does and that’s the problem, more than he could ever put into words. His hand on hers is so tight he worries he’s hurting her, but Maker, he hopes this isn’t the last touch he gets.

“It’s too much,” Cullen admits and his voice wavers at the end. He clears his throat, willing himself to get through this at least. “You don’t need more weight to carry.” 

“When will you see that you are deserving of the same love that you give me?” Maker damn him for doing this to her...she sounds so very sad. “If you were to leave, I’d follow you to the very end of Thedas to make sure you were safe.” 

He finally lets his head hang as his eyesight blurs. You should be afraid , he wants to say. There’s a nagging thing at the back of his mind, a chain looping around his neck to remind him of–of something. Teeth buried in the meat of his shoulder, claws scouring up and down his back. He longs, with anguish, for his mother, not knowing that she is already rotting in the mud of their tilled earth. Stop.

But she’s back home and safe and everything is fine–so lovely with her hair falling loose and curly down her back, looking at him with those weary blue eyes. Not lyrium blue. Blue like cloudless skies, like ink smudges on his fingers, like the waters of the creek near Honnleath, like the slippers she keeps in her quarters for him in case his toes get cold on the stone floors. 

Instead Cullen finally mumbles, “I think…I think I’ll take that tea now, actually.” 

“Alright, duck.” And then she is squeezing his hand, her mere touch radiating a gentleness that he has not earned, will never earn – and Cullen is consumed with self-loathing.

Chapter Text

The last days of August fall upon Skyhold with a rare burst of quiet. The people are taking advantage of the fine weather before Kingsway ushers in autumn winds, and the Inquisitor has returned to them safe from Ferelden–that is cause enough to be joyful. They have some rare weeks before the party must depart once again, plans for the Emprise du Lion still in progress as scouting reports trickle in. And thus, for the first time since perhaps the beginning, Cullen and Maeve find themselves with quite a long stretch of them both in the castle. 

“You’re awfully eager today,” Maeve says, laughing against his mouth as they tumble over the threshold into her chambers. It’s a late Wednesday afternoon; the sun stretching across the stone floors threads her hair and skin with gold. 

“Someone,” Cullen murmurs, one hand searching behind him for the door - close the door, damn it . “Someone decided to hold their sparring drills right beneath my office in a pair of very tight trousers.” 

“Oh really? Maeve snickers and it turns into a gasp when he kisses her high on her neck, just behind the lobe of her ear. “Curious. I’ll have to inquire about that, it seems highly inappropriate.” 

“Mhm.” He’s distracted by the soft tendrils of her hair, falling out of her neat braids, ticking against his nose. She smells of her perfume-vanilla and something sweet he can’t place–and of sweat from the day’s work.  

“Distraction for the troops and all. They’re very impressionable, you know.” It will always amaze him how Maeve manages to remain so elegant in backward steps as Cullen steers her deeper into the room towards the massive four poster bed that dominates one side of the room. A luxury to be sure, but one that they’ve made good use of. 

He spends two or three nights a week here when she’s at Skyhold. It’s cozy, safe. It even smells like her, soaps and incense and dried herbs by the window that envelop him in something so distinctly Maeve. And she has welcomed him into this space, bit by bit. Books from his trunk that have picked themselves up and moved to house her shelves. A spare shaving kit tucked amongst her vanity. The bed in question pushed closer to the windows after he confessed his dislike of small spaces and low ceilings. 

“It’s not the troops you should be worried about,” Cullen rumbles, his arms wrapping around her waist as her laugh disappears into the worn wool of his collar. She’s liquid beneath his fingers, every inch of her relaxed and pliant against him “I had work to do today before you…diverted my attention.” 

“You’re not the only one with work, Commander,” she says with a sudden seriousness that at one point Cullen might have been gullible enough to believe, but now he can spot the smile tucked into one corner of her mouth. “A whole stack of letters to get through for our persistent Ambassador.” And here she pretends to pout, the expression never quite working on her long, sharp face but she tries and Cullen adores her for it. 

“And yet,” she continues as one finger comes to stroke the bridge of his nose, trailing over the bump he earned after breaking it in basic training, “you’re very handsome when you storm down the ramparts looking every inch the Lion of Skyhold.” Maeve’s lips curl into a proper smile when he scowls at the ridiculous moniker. 

“But they don’t know what I know,” she murmurs; her nails graze over the tops of his cheeks, the tips of his ears, to the fine hairs at the bottom of his neck.   

“And what’s that?” 

Her eyes sparkle like Orzammar diamonds in the afternoon light. “That you’re sweeter than they think you are. You’re sweet on me . My sweet man.”  

The tips of his ears burn. For a moment Cullen’s tongue fumbles, and so he settles on placing a large open palm on the small of her back, pulling her flush to his chest. They’re pressed together, hovering just a few paces away from the foot of her bed, and she smells of flowers like she always does. She has to rise on her tiptoes, only just, to kiss the underside of his jaw, her lips velvet against his late afternoon shadow. 

Her sweet man, her sweet man. Her man. He’s hers. If he repeats this to himself enough maybe the words will sink into his skin forever instead of freezing a touch away. Cullen blinks, and then focuses back in on her–on this moment. 

They haven’t had sex since their fight in his office nearly two weeks ago. Nights have been spent curled in his bed or hers, and some alone when he doesn’t realize the lateness of the hour. Those nights he sleeps fitfully and for not long enough, and the morning afters are marked by pre-dawn walks to shake the shadows from his mind. 

They haven’t had sex but Cullen…Cullen wants her. Clashes of steel dragged his attention from his reports out the little window overlooking the training yard, and when he tipped his head to see the commotion, he found Maeve dancing across the courtyard, training sword in hand and Blackwall pacing before her. Even from his tower he could see the sweat-curled hair glinting in the sun. 

Oh but she is beautiful, Cullen had thought. She always is, will always be, but out of her normal skirts she is wearing a wide necked top that slips down one shoulder and— Maker’s breath, are those leather trousers?

He was moving towards the door before he even realized it. Now, with this beautiful woman in his arms, any thoughts of reports and requisitions are falling to the back of his mind. 

Cullen doesn’t say a word but she must see something in his face that she likes, perhaps the blush staining his cheeks, and some fond thing in her eyes softens, a warmth that fills him entirely, curling through his ribs and behind his breastbone. Maeve’s hand reaches to thumb at his stubble-rough jaw. He’s not sure he’ll ever get over it: the quiet strength she holds, soft hands and new calluses against his skin, the confidence with which she touches him.  

“You look tired, duck. Did you sleep last night?” 

He turns his head to nuzzle at the thin skin on her inner wrist. “I missed you,” he admits quietly. “I always miss you when you’re not lying next to me.” 

A concerned faint line appears between her brows. “The door to my chambers is always open for you.” 

“It was late–” 

“It’s always open,” she repeats, very solemn. “I missed you too.” The pads of her fingers continue to stroke across his flesh, tiny circles on his cheekbones, at the corners of his eyes, at the scar on his cheek. Her favorite spot to kiss, he thinks, and some days he is able to look in the mirror and not mind it quite so much. She is so sure, so confident in herself and in him, with the knowledge that he will always be in love with her, and Cullen – 

Cullen is thinking too much. Too much about things that he can’t control and not enough about her, kiss-swollen and lazily smirking up at him. His arms around her tighten, running blunt fingers down the ridge of her spine through her blouse and finally allowing himself to slide large hands over the swell of her bottom. 

“Besides,” she says as if Cullen is not palming her through those damned trousers, so tight they’re practically painted on. “Who else will hog all the blankets for himself?”  

“Well there’s that cat you keep feeding even though you know you shouldn’t…”

Cullen is close enough to see the way her eyes crease in the corners and when she sways into him, her breath warms his cheeks, still smelling like the honied bread she’d had at breakfast. He can’t help it, he never can–he kisses her, her cheeks, her nose, the corner of her lips. 

“Oh?” Her laugh is soft and warm into his ear as Cullen continues pressing kisses, just this side of dry, down her neck. “I see, it’s that sort of ‘missed me.’” 

“Not only that…” And then his lips are back on hers, squeezing her arse as he brings her close to kiss her for real, the type that makes her gasp in surprise all high and sweet, a sound that he gladly takes to hold close. They’re fine. Everything is fine. She’s forgiven him for the Smite and he will never forgive himself but they are fine. 

“It’s just that you leave for Orlais in a few weeks,” Cullen says in-between kisses, “I’ve only just–” A biting press to her collarbone that he soothes with his tongue. “–gotten you back.”

“Six weeks,” she croons; practiced fingers find the buckles of his gambeson, tugging it off him in one graceful movement. Cullen sends a silent prayer of thanks upward that he’d not bothered with the armor today. “Six weeks with nobody but Dorian and Cassandra and Blackwall–” 

Cullen groans when her nails scratch the soft skin of his belly, working up under his shirt in a way that ought to be ticklish but instead makes his toes curl in his boots. “You know he fancies you.”

“Mhm, I’d noticed. He’s very embarrassed about it,” Maeve says, leaning back just enough for Cullen to work the ties of her blouse open. Her head tips up when he lays an open mouth kiss on the top of her breasts. From this angle he can see the long, pale column of her neck, miles of skin he aches to mark with his teeth. “But Blackwall behaves.”

“He better,” Cullen growls into the pillow-soft flesh just above her breastband. He spares a moment, as he often does, to admire how her breasts fit so neatly into the curve of his palm, before Maeve’s touch on his shoulder pulls him back to the present.

“Cheeky man. But you needn’t be jealous - our Warden knows there’s someone out there who–” A whine escapes the back of Maeve’s throat when he nips her sensitive skin, just as he knew it would. “--who rivals him as a swordsman should he offend.” 

“I’m a better swordsman than him,” Cullen mutters, and Maeve buries a peal of delighted laughter in his hair. She wraps her arms around his shoulders, runs her fingers over his scalp, tugs him to angle his head just a touch differently. A satisfied smile dimples her cheeks; he can see just one of her eyes and a hint of another through the mess of curls that have fallen into her face, but she shines with adoration. 

It is a miracle that he hasn’t crumpled under this, the rapturous weight of her love. 

This is all he needed. All he has ever needed. The anxious thoughts that have billowed about him for weeks fade to nothing except the feeling of her body against his. To be surrounded and beloved–the way only she has made him feel, mapping his body with such certainty. As if she was there with the Maker at the very sight of his creation.

“I dream of you,” she whispers into him when they are forced apart, just long enough to drag air into their lungs. “Every night. Your hand in mine, your chest, your legs, your strong arms, your warmth.” Cullen’s breath stutters when she licks into his mouth, that smile still caressing every tired crease of her face. “I dreamt of the future we’ll have together, once this is over.” 

“The future?” He does not dare to hope for such things, even when these very same thoughts find him in rare quiet instances over a chess board or a shared meal. 

“A peaceful life.” She doesn’t pull away from the kiss, just gentles her mouth on his; her voice is a prayer for him alone. “No more fighting, no more judgments. One we can build…together. I’d like that. A house on the Drakon River. With a garden. You’ll have one of those dreadful mabari and it’ll dig up my turnips.” 

“The house can’t be on the river. You can’t swim.” Her hand pulls his to her breast, squeezing it firmly through the linen wraps.

“Well, you’ll teach me.” 

“And you hate dogs.”

“I do not hate them.”

“You’d want to stay here? In Ferelden?” 

They’re still standing at the foot of her bed, both their shirts undone and loose, her chest rubbed pink from his stubble and his hair standing on end. Maeve gazes up at him through her eyelashes; he can see just a ring of blue around her irises, a little stream around the deep black of her pupils. 

“I’ll stay–” Her long, clever fingers pick at the waistband of his trousers. “—with you wherever the Maker takes us, this world and into the next. But Ferelden is close to your siblings. And I like how the air here smells in spring. Far better to start a family here than in the Marches.” 

Cullen’s heart skips a beat, then settles. Inside his trousers, his cock hesitantly twitches to life. A garden hidden in his chest blossoms under her light. In moments like these, he understands why there are those who build shrines to her. What else could she be if not sent for his own delivery?   

“Hey,” Maeve says, in a voice that bellies sudden unsurety. “I shouldn’t have–we haven’t talked about–” 

Cullen opens his eyes. She is there, red cheeks and dark eyes, mortal woman once more. It takes him but a moment to reach up and brush hair from her face, to run a finger over the crease between her brows, the soft smudges beneath her eyes that speak of long days. 

“I’d like that,” he finally says, very quite but surer in this than anything in his life, even as his heart picks up a frantic beat. “A family…with you. I’d like that very much.” 

And Maeve smiles at him, delighted and shy in equal measure. She smiles so sweetly at him that, for just a moment, he can ignore the sudden stirring in his stomach, the ever present wonder if he will ever truly be good enough for her. But then she is rising up her toes once more, the tips of her boots bumping against him as she nudges him back, just slightly, and the back of his knees hit the bed. 

He catches himself on his elbows as she settles on top of him, long Marcher legs bent at his hips to press him down into the feathered mattress. Still smiling coyly down at him, she shrugs fully out of her blouse, letting the linen slide down her shoulders until she tosses it off the bed to land in some forgotten corner for later. The breastband follows quickly after, and Cullen watches with appreciation as the pale skin of her breasts pebbles in the clean air. She takes a moment to breath, her hips shifting against his. And then, clearly pleased at the groan he lets out as the bulge in his trousers brushes against her arse, Maeve grins before grinding her hips more deeply back into him. 

This is not a position they do often–their roles are reversed certainly from the last time he found himself undressed in her chambers. As she leans over him, hands on either side of his head, her thick hair pools around them in a heavy curtain, obscuring the rest of the room in a haze of copper. Guilt in his stomach suddenly churns and sours, spreading downwards, even as his hands tremble as they unlace her breeches.  

It shouldn’t feel this way when she touches him. Not when he knows that she is so good, and so good for him. He is a far better man than the wretch Cassandra fished out of a tavern in Kirkwall, not a good man but a better man. Maeve thinks of him as a good man. Some days, Cullen isn’t so sure. 

It takes effort to concentrate on the angle and pressure of his head. Which way to turn his head to best meet her lips? Would she be more comfortable resting more above him, less pressure on her knees? She kisses him, all tongue, and his fingers automatically wind themselves into her copper curls. Anything to keep him grounded in this moment, in this room, with her. Thinking. 

She is kissing her way down his chest now when did he lose his shirt as her hair spills around her shoulders, red like roses in the garden, like sparrows in the morning like blood upon the stone where he walked as a young knight with his friends. A shiver runs down his spine and lodges in his belly.

He is a lucky man to wake at her side, to see the way early sunlight kisses her skin to turn it golden. It is a sight many holy men would kill for, as is her willingly crawling down his body, lips sliding across his torso and through the coarse hair darkening over his stomach. His eyes flutter shut; his breath catches. This will be his strength, every movement made to mask the guilt, the suspicion that she deserves better than him and always will. 

Her hair parted around him, deep purple and black that smells of putrid gore.

He can’t tell if he’s still hard or not but Cullen reaches forward anyways, looking for anything to lead him back to her. 

Little templar, what do you dream about in the dark of night?  

This is too familiar a feeling, one he is desperate beyond description to leave behind, because he wants her with a sort of desire he did not think was possible to contain in a single body. It doesn’t feel this way when he is the one to lay caresses upon her and yet now as his hips cant up to meet her mouth, he finds himself struggling for breath. 

The late summer air presses against the hollows of his skull, too dry and hot. He is intimately aware of the fibers of the comforter under his palms, the torchlight flickering along his sickly, bruise-battered skin , her soft rose-smelling hair tickling his inner thigh as she mouths at him through cotton. 

Teeth buried in the meat of his shoulder, claws scouring up and down his legs. Breath hot against him as his cock strains for vicious lips. 

He longs, with anguish, for Mother, knowing that she is already rotting in the mud of their tilled earth with Father.

“Cullen.” 

The mage in Chantry robes on the other side of the room smiles, and Her teeth are fangs that drip crimson.

She has already marked him for Death. 

“Cullen,” Maeve says, her touch achingly soft against his cheek. “Sweetheart. Stop.” 

There was never a way of knowing before Maeve how his body could feel under the touch of another.  She is a balm to a wound he wasn’t aware he had–a solve to the loneliness he knew but had not worried gaped within him. Before her, the longest relationship even close to this had been a merchant in Kirkwall, and even then that was hasty dalliances in the back of her shop that cooled as soon as Meredith turned a sharp eye to him.

And he’s been trying to be good for her, to be as good as she believes him to be. Always kisses her slow and sweet, asking before touching and never in public unless she welcomes it first. Afternoon tea taken with lemon, morning tea black and strong. Apple tarts stolen from the kitchens because he likes to lap at the sugar dust on her lips. Kisses for the tired lines under her eyes and the mole on her cheek and the shell of her ear until she laughs and smiles at him like he’s the only thing in her entire world, like the weight of Thedas doesn’t bear down on her outside their doors. 

Most days, Cullen is terrified of it. This thing that they have created is stronger than anything he has ever felt, and also so fragile that he is convinced that one day he will blunder into it and it will shatter. Like he keeps doing, over and over and over again. 

“I’m sorry,” he gasps out even as his own hands still against her bare waist. “I can keep going, I can still–” 

She’s not bent above him anymore. Instead she is knelt to his side, close enough to touch but giving him enough space to push himself up into a sitting position. He’s shirtless, trousers half-pushed down his thighs, and his cock embarrassingly soft in his smallclothes. It takes a moment to remember how to breathe, his chest heaving with heavy pants.  

“Something is wrong…” Maeve says, concerned and upset. She too is half dressed, but as she sits there she’s wrapping arms around her chest, as if she’s suddenly self-aware of her nudity. “It’s like–it’s like last time… Are you hurting? Is it your head? Your knee?” 

Shame burns in Cullen’s belly and he chokes out a gasp, strangled and gagging. 

Her hand, still lightly worrying at his shoulder, pulls away and he cannot find the strength to snatch them back. Please don’t let go of me. He reaches, blind in the sunlight sweeping in from the open windows, and finds her leg and does not let go. There’s a noise trapped at the back of his mouth and between his teeth; he’s not sure if it's a sob or a scream. 

Cullen doesn’t know how to break the feeling in his chest down into little parts and words, just enough to explain to her that it’s not–it’s not her. How to say… You are the most important thing that has ever happened to me. I want you. I want you to take what is rightfully yours. I want to be worthy of the things you offer. 

She looks at him like she knows, because she has always been too perceptive for her own good, especially when it comes to him. She knows as well as he that something is terribly, terribly wrong, and neither of them know how to muddle their way through it. 

So when Maeve asks, “Is it sex?” Cullen feels a little bit like crying, something he hasn’t done probably in years. He can’t even remember.  

“It’s not all sex,” Cullen says desperately, because he thinks about it and her more than he ought to. Sometimes she’ll just be standing across from him in a council meeting, soft candlelight tracing the contours of face, and her lips purse in concentration. And then Cullen thinks about how those same lips look gasping his name as he works two fingers into her, and how those lips would feel around his cock, so pink and wet and warm and—

Then an icy dagger slices him sternum to belly, and he cannot finish the fantasy.  

The room blurs around him and so he closes his eyes instinctively. “I’m fine. I can keep going–” 

“No, duck,” Maeve murmurs and when he opens his eyes again she is looking down at the rumpled sheets beneath them. He can’t read beyond the sadness he sees there. “No, you’re not fine. And I won’t–I won’t push you into something you don’t want.”

“You’re not pushing,” Cullen insists even as his voice cracks around the words. Thinks about the way her hip fits under his hands, the smell of her on his sheets, the tickle of her hair on his thigh. “I want this. Maeve, I want–” 

And finds that he cannot finish the sentence. His mouth opens and closes around the words, but no sound comes out as he stares wide eyed at her. Maeve’s sad eyes crease at the inner corners, yet her fingers are impossibly gentle as they find his hand, winding him into her grasp effortlessly. It seems impossible that less than an hour ago Cullen was ogling her in her trousers like some lovesick teenager, even less than that since they tumbled into her quarters with one hand already up her blouse. 

“What do you want?” She prompts him, very quiet. 

“You,” he says immediately, for that is an easy question. “Always you. And…and everything you would offer.” 

“Can I hold you?” She asks then, and it takes every ounce of his strength to not beg for her touch. 

Lips against his temple, soft caresses to his hair. He has to stop himself from pressing his face into the hollows of her collarbone, as if he might be able to crawl inside her chest and hide there just between her ribs until his own heart slows to a stop. 

She is looking at him with that same quiet, patient look; the pads of her fingers circle the fine skin of his inner wrist and one day he will not be the cause of her pain, but today he will not be able to avoid it. He waits for her to ask more, knowing that the look in her eyes means questions about the why and the what are pressing forward, and he finds himself holding his breath. 

But no questions come. Instead her head tips forward after a moment to rest her cheek against his temple, her warm breath ghosting through his hair. It’s the sort of closeness that was utterly foreign to Cullen until six months ago; no templars curled together like this, all of them hard angles and silverite not meant to fit so gently. The sort of touch that he’s fought in the past with the urge to get up after a few minutes just to make up something to do with his hands, only now it reminds him that he is alive and he’s here, with Maeve, in this castle in the mountains at the end of the world. 

“All I want,” Maeve says, very firm, her lips moving against his skin in a different type of intimacy, “is for you to be happy. However long it takes.” 

And then, before Cullen can stop the words from slipping out– “I love you.” 

“I–uh–” He chokes out after a moment of very still silence. “I mean–I–I just–” And Cullen makes to pull away as his cheeks burn red and his heart stutters to a near stop, until her arms tighten around him. He forces himself to meet her gaze, and finds that she wears a small smile. 

“I love you too,” Maeve says and another piece falls into place. “I had hoped that was obvious.” 

She loves him, she loves him, she loves him. 

“Tell me. Please.” 

She slides her palm over the base of his throat, the most gentle of touches. 

“I’ve had some lovers before,” she says, and Cullen’s throat is dry. “But none like you. Nobody has ever loved me in the way that you do.” 

“Mae,” he whispers, and hopes she can hear everything held on his tongue that he begs one day he will be able to say out loud. 

“My sweet man,” she murmurs, and the words settle around him, held in place by her thumb on his pulse point. Surely she can hear how his chest drums for her. “You take care of me, and I love you for it. When you read to me. When you pretend to check my packing when you’re really leaving love notes for me to find weeks later. When you smile, your skin creases just here–” Her free hand brushes against his eyelashes and he’s frozen even as his body yearns to turn into her, knowing just the way his cheek feels nestled in her palm. “And you have a dimple, just there–like you save it just for me.” 

"I love you,” she says right into his ear, even as he flushes red under her affection. “My body under your hands, the way you feel against me. You’re always so slow, like you’re worried you’re going to hurt me, and so quiet. But baby, you feel so warm inside of me. I love when you tell me I’m being good for you. When you say I’m your precious girl.” 

Distantly, Cullen feels himself stiffen against her leg. It would be so easy to lean up and kiss just under her jaw, to roll her over into the mattress to rub himself against the crook of her thigh and bite at her nipples until they’re swollen purple and she’s arching up into him. He’s never had someone, man or woman, gasp so sweetly as he’s pushing into them. But he’s still thinking about the what and why and the I’m sorry and she has more still to say.

“The things you say when you think I’m asleep. Maker, if you could hear yourself.” 

He’s sure she feels the way his heart leaps, beyond sure that she can feel how he swallows, even though it’s dry enough to hurt. “What do I say?” 

“That I’m yours,” she says simply, and Cullen opens his mouth to say something but finds he can only take in air. His bones feel as though they’re trembling in his skin, up through his spine and deep into his skull, ready to leap out at any moment. In the presence of anyone else, he would be embarrassed. 

“I wasn’t lying,” Maeve says, just a little far away. She’s carding a hand through his hair, long fingers toying with an errant curl. If she feels him half-hard against him, she doesn’t say anything. “I never thought about a future beyond the Circle. Never had any reason too. I’d die in the tower, or be transferred to die somewhere else. I only hoped it would be by the ocean. But now it’ll be with you.” 

“Don’t say that,” Cullen croaks, and holds on to her so tightly it must hurt. His fingers tangle in her hair, pressing her chest to his so that their lungs may become one, and he can’t feel his legs. 

“Old and grey, duck,” she says as she pulls the heavy duvet up and over them. “Not until we’re old and grey.” 

They try sex again two days later, and get nowhere. Truthfully, he only gets as far as his tongue in her mouth, because as soon as Maeve lays a hand on his chest, his head spins with a rush of pleasure that’s immediately drowned out by sheer panic. She says it’s okay even as she pulls her shirt back on and makes them a pot of strong tea, but Cullen is far from convinced. Each day brings another weight to his shoulders, another tightening of an iron ball around his ankles, and he finds himself more and more at loss with what to do with himself. 

And so he does what he does best, and he throws himself into his work. 

It is a tactic that has served him well through many years in the Circles to stave off migraines and nightmares, to curb any distraction that may pull him under and back into the shadows of the past. What sleep he manages is wracked with perhaps the worst dreams he has suffered in years, rivaling the worst of the early withdrawals. More than once he finds a dreamless sleep potion left on his desk for him from Varric, but he doesn’t care for the drowsiness they bring with them and so away it goes into a drawer to be forgotten.

Still, he is determined not to draw within himself this time, even when exhaustion tugs at his eyelids and the stacks on his desk loom large. Still, he keeps his appointments and leads training sessions, makes time for his reports, and even delights Josephine by attending a dreaded gatherings of Orlesian nobles, who purse their lips and prod at him with sharp tongues and beg heroic war stories from him when all he knows is tragedy. He keeps meals with Maeve, pretends to sleep next to her when really he can’t tear his eyes away from the wooden planked ceiling. He is present perhaps physically, but every day is a battle to focus. 

In his dreams, he drowns in lyrium. In the past he had the philters to give him strength even through sleepless nights — now, the song carves whole pieces from him. 

The others notice. Cullen has made a career of sensing when he is being studied , and so it does not miss him when Blackwall’s eyes linger, when Josephine’s words come gentler, when Dorian drops by his office one too many times to be merely about chess. Even the Iron Bull had ceased to hide his staring, a knowing, hard gaze piercing Cullen from across the courtyard. He wonders if the Bull has spoken to others of their conversation, and packs that thought away as soon as it comes to him to fret about later. 

Logically he knows they all mean well, but their concern is cutting. He feels flayed open before them, every sinew raw and bleeding for them to parse through with knives. 

He agonizes, most of all, over Maeve, and what she must think of him. Will it be tomorrow that she decides enough is enough, or the next? How long will she drag on her judgement of him? 

As it turns out, he needs only wait five days, but her decision comes in a form he did not expect. 

It starts with a weapons shipment on a Monday morning. Cataloging them are one of the more tedious tasks, but one Cullen takes with great care to examine every sword for improper notches or an ill-balanced grip. Stifling a yawn in the palm of one hand and balancing a cup of coffee with the other, he gently shoulders the heavy door to the armory open, only to stop in his tracks when Captain Wolfe looks up from an open shipping crate with a startled expression.

“Commander!” Wolffe exclaims, snapping to attention at once. A few paces to his left, Lieutenant Clarke and, of all people, secretary Quincy have similarly straightened in a salute, a clipboard tucked under the former’s arm. “I wasn’t aware you’d be joining us,” the captain says when Cullen freezes in the doorway. 

“Joining…you?” Cullen repeats slowly as his mind furiously backtracks through the previous day to see if he’d forgotten some change to the schedule, but nothing comes up. “I wasn’t made aware that the inspection had been moved up. Or that it was to begin without me,” he adds pointedly.  

He levies a frown at Quincy who has the decency to look a little stricken before nervously stepping forward. 

“Ser, I had made a note on your itinerary this morning. The change came late last night–I presumed you made the call...” 

“What change?” 

“That Captain Wolffe was to take over inspection duties moving forward,” Quincy says, sounding incredibly puzzled as Cullen continues to stare at him. “I, uh, am gathering that you were not made aware.” 

“No,” Cullen says flatly. “No, I was not made aware. Who sent the messenger?” 

Quincy noticeably pales until Lieutenant Clarke steps forward, looking just as confused as Cullen’s poor secretary as she says, “It was one of Ambassador Montyliet’s, ser, but I believe the message came from Inquisitor Trevelyan’s office.” 

Cullen feels his eyebrows raise in disbelief and Clarke, normally a difficult woman to unnerve, shifts from foot to foot. 

“There must have been a miscommunication,” Captain Wolffe grumbles. “It won’t happen again, ser.” 

“No,” Cullen agrees easily even as a growing sense of alarm creeps up his spine.  “Shall we continue with the inspection?” 

He puts the matter to rest almost immediately, but to his utter bewilderment, more abrupt changes to his itinerary occur, all seemingly by the Inquisitor's hand. He receives a notice from Blackwall that archery training has moved to Thursday afternoons where it conflicts with staff reviews, finds a training regime requesting approval from Captain Rylen instead of himself and, most befuddling of all, finds a notation in her script on top of Quincy desk to schedule his physical with a healer at the earliest convenience. The Inquisitor invites herself along to tours of the valley camp, shows up early to war room meetings rather than her usual just-on-time approach, and takes to staring at him with a sort of contemplative, scrutinizing look that he’s more used to seeing her level upon Cole, or perhaps Solas when he’s being particularly pedantic. 

Usually Cullen has no issue with her presence, after all she is the Inquisitor and also the most important person in his life, and thus is someone he will always make time for night or day, but given the events of recent, he finds it stifling in a way he has never thought to associate with Maeve. 

It all comes to a head when a deeply disgruntled Cassandra finds him one afternoon in the training grounds when Cullen is halfway through his personal drills. She plants herself on the edge of the patch of dirt he has claimed, waiting just at the edge of his vision for him to pause in his hammering on a practice dummy. 

“Did you need something?” 

Cassandra eyes him suspiciously, her arms crossed across her chest as she levies an unimpressed look at him. “You’ve done something.” 

His stomach lurches, then settles. Cassandra has always been too perceptive for her own good, a quality that has served her well for a career with the Seekers. Cullen tries, and presumably fails judging by the rising arch of her brow, to look innocent. “Have I?” 

“She’s hovering ,” Cassandra says pointedly and he does not have to ask who she is referring to. 

“Yes, I had noticed that,” Cullen mutters and tosses the practice sword back to the dirt, relenting with a sigh that this conversation will not be easily avoided. 

“She’s asked me to remain here instead of going to the Emprise,” she announces next and Cullen abruptly feels a scowl take over his face.“The Iron Bull will accompany the party instead. Your name did not come up, but I can only assume you are the reason.” 

Cullen shrugs his gambeson back on over his tunic. Above them, a hot sun peeks through a gap in the battlements, and sweat already beading on the back of his neck drips down his shirt uncomfortably. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

“Of that I have serious doubts,” Cassandra snorts. “For all her prowess of the Game, the Inquisitor is not subtle on matters concerning you .” 

He pauses in the act of buckling his sword belt to his hip in order to glower once more at the Seeker. “Your concern is noted, but not necessary. Nothing is wrong with me or her.” 

“Oh that’s reassuring,” Cassandra complains mostly to herself, and Cullen huffs once more in irritation as he stomps away. The back of his neck prickles, almost as if he can feel Cassandra’s suspicious gaze tracking him even across the courtyard. 

He doesn’t like being annoyed with Maeve. She is, after all, his commanding officer first and foremost, but on a more personal note he respects her opinion above all else, even when they butt heads on official matters. Her preference for subterfuge over soldiers, for meddling over might. He does not like to fight with her in their personal lives, too sure that one more disagreement will be all she needs to pack her bags for good. But this he cannot ignore, and so he goes to her that night. 

“You told Cassandra to keep an eye on me?” 

She looks up at him from her journal, eyes widening as she takes him in across her small windowless office. He’s planted himself behind one of her straight-backed chairs, fingers tapping against the wood incessantly. 

Cullen watches as her head tips slightly and her lips purse as she wars her next words in her head carefully. He knows her well enough by now to notice her tells – that little frown tucked into the corner of her mouth and click of her nails against the scrubbed wood desktop – and see when she’s bracing for a fight.

 “I don’t believe I phrased it… precisely like that,” she begins. 

“I don’t need a nanny.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, it’s not a nanny –” 

“And you’ve been interfering with my schedule!” 

“Well, you work too much,” Maeve says dismissively, even as tiny pinpricks of color appear on the top of her cheeks. “It’s not good for you.” 

“How I manage my work is my prerogative,” Cullen snaps. “And any interference is, well, it’s-it’s–”

“It’s what?” 

“It’s mollycoddling !”  

“Just because someone is looking out for you doesn’t mean it’s mollycoddling,” Maeve points out, sounding a little like she’s lecturing a young child. Cullen tries and fails to resist the surge of frustration within him. 

“Cassandra doesn’t know - she doesn’t need to know something is awry,” he says jerkily, still standing ramrod straight behind the chair. “All you did was call attention to it and embarrass me.” 

“I didn’t say–” 

“It’s not your place, Maeve!” Cullen’s voice raises sharply as his anger bubbles right to the top. “You shouldn’t have done anything!” 

Her jaw drops. “Not my place?” She sputters out and the journal she’s paused her entries in closes with a snap. “Cullen, I’m your partner . I’m allowed to worry about you!” 

“Worrying is one thing,” Cullen grits out. “You stuck your nose in where it shouldn’t have been and meddled.  Completely unnecessarily .” 

“Is it not?” Maeve demands, rising from her chair to lean across the desk towards him. “Because you’re not sleeping! You’re not eating!” 

“I’m worried about you,” she says when he remains silent, a thread of desperation edging in, and now she takes a few steps nearer to him. He hasn’t moved from his position hovering behind the chair, and when he does not unclench she instead leans back on the desk with her legs crossed at the ankles to regard him with concern. “Let me. Let me help you.” 

“You don’t have to worry about me,” he mutters. Under his gloves, his palms bead with nervous sweat. “I’m handling it.” 

“How?” Maeve exclaims, her hands flying up in the air in exasperation. “How are you handling it? By working yourself into the ground? You told me weeks ago you would go to the healers to get herbs to help with the impotence!” 

Cullen immediately flushes a dark red, and averts his eyes from hers. “It’s not - Maeve, it’s complicated .” 

“Let me help you,” she says again and he shakes his head. 

“You don’t have to do that.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because–” 

She cuts him off. “Because the way I look at it, we’ve been having this same conversation since before Adamant, and we will continue to have it until something changes. You refuse help and I don’t know why.” 

“It’s not simple to fix!” 

“Of course it’s not” Maeve cries with obvious annoyance. “If it was simple we wouldn’t be doing this over and over again! It wouldn’t be getting worse!” 

Cullen’s hands itch to find the pommel of his sword, a stance that has served him well for many years of strangling his emotions into submission. But of course he has come to her unarmed and vulnerable, and yet he is too ashamed to meet her eyes. He looks down at his hands, which coincidentally means looking at Maeve’s shoes crossed at the ankle, her bare skin peeking just over the leather tops.

 “I am trying here, Maeve,” and now he gazes up at her through his lashes, head still bowed. “I don’t know what else you want from me.” 

“Try harder,” she says fiercely, and immediately looks as though she regrets these words when Cullen gapes at her. A moment passes and one of her hands comes to rub at her forehead as she mumbles, “I didn’t mean that.”

“Didn't you?” Cullen challengess, far angrier at her than he perhaps has ever been and angry at himself, as he nearly always is. The wooden chair under his palms creaks ominously; his muscles are coiled with absolute tension. He takes a very long breath in-and-out in-and-out and has to look away from her, red-cheeked and frustrated.

“It’s never going to get better so quit working so damn hard. I’ve been trying for twenty fucking years to be good and nothing is working. It’s hopeless, so just…just stop .” 

She blinks at him, shocked into silence for the first time since he’s known her, and he watches as her arms tighten over her chest defensively. He wonders if she is ever frightened of him, the Knight-Captain and the Circle Enchanter. He would be, if he was her, he thinks. If he had known her in Kirkwall…it doesn’t even bear to think about. Enough nights have been broken up with the ghost of Meredith Stannard and the mage-prisons of the Gallows. 

“Cullen, it’s not hopeless,” Maeve says faintly. “Why would you say something like that?” 

He laughs, and the sound feels hollow as it leaves him. “Because it’s true, of course it is. I’ll survive it. I always have.” 

Maeve’s face is rapidly draining of color; compared to her copper curls, she is nearly bloodless. Her lips flatten with clear displeasure as she stares at him. “That’s not true. You know that’s not true. Nothing is wrong with you.” 

“Stop lying to yourself,” Cullen spits out, and he finally pries his fingers off the tops of the chair, only to fall to the pommel of his sword. Pain, pain, pain deep in his chest as She looks at him with delighted cruel eyes, wicked as She always is. “I’ve been trying for years, I really have, but I just can’t seem to make it right. Just some…wretched lyrium sick addict .” 

“Oh we’ll have none of that,” Maeve says at once. His gaze is so firmly locked on the patch of stone just over her head that he hears rather than sees her feet carry her just a few steps closer to him. The only thing between them is the chair, straight lines and carved cherrywood, and on his sword his hands fight to stay still. She is standing very close to him, every inch the Inquisitor as she levels a serious look unto him. He is taller even when she is wearing her boots, but right now he feels painfully small compared to her. 

“I’m not trying to push you into something you don’t want to do.” Maeve shifts from one foot to another in discomfort as she weighs her next words. Finally, she says, “I worry about you, I always worry about you, you must know that. And I have a tendency to…mother hen sometimes. Alright–” she concedes when he opens his mouth. “I mother hen quite a bit, are you happy?” 

"There's no need to–” Cullen says again, still angry, but she cuts him off with firm words. 

“No, let me finish.” She takes a deep breath before plunging onward. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have interfered with your schedule and routine without speaking to you about it first. That was wrong of me, and it was never my intention to embarrass you. And I know…I know you’re trying. I see how hard you’re working. I’m sorry. But–” Her eyes light with determination he’s all too familiar with from debates on mage and troop movements. “I will apologize for overstepping, but I won’t apologize for wanting to help. I won’t leave you in this alone.” 

And Cullen wants to believe her, because Maeve has never lied to him, but he doesn’t, he can’t–

When he finally speaks, he is resigned before her. “You don’t give up, do you?”  

“Never.” 

“Why?” 

Maeve smiles, wry and knowing all at once. “Oh I don’t know. I guess these things just happen when you love someone.” 

He takes his leave from her office soon after, not quite able to handle the bullish set to her jaw and quiet frustration any long. She is at her ends with him surely, and offended as Cullen is by her interfering with his itinerary, he knows she means well. Cullen has grown to appreciate the dance Maeve plays around wily personal attacks that she presses upon her enemies in the Orlesian courts, but in her personal life she is unsurprisingly persistent.  

The path between her office and his is now familiar to him as his own sword arm after so many months. The door clicks shut behind him and Cullen tries to take a breath and finds that it only comes out in very small, tight gasps. As he eases himself down into a chair, the pressure in his chest coils somewhere behind his breast bone, and his vision feels fractured, small bits like uncoiling vines creeping into the sides that are surely the blood vessels trying their best not to burst. 

Slowly, he runs a check: feet, firmly laced in his boots on the cold stone floor; arms, there if only to hang loosely at his sides as if cut from their strings; chest, encased in silverite but no more constricting than usual. Surely there’s nothing wrong with his heart if it’s still beating this strong. 

He leans forward to brace his elbows on his knees, fingers finding his hair to grip and hold, just to get some sensation working back into him. The sharp pulls ground him here in this dark office, the sweet smell of her perfume still clinging to his mantle. 

Cullen will remember little else from that evening. He knows the armor he wore upon his body remained for many hours more and by the time the moon hangs high in the sky, his shoulders ache. Truthfully, what he remembers is this and this alone: after the argument with Maeve, he sits on the hard office chair for many hours, a song he has tried desperately to forget winding through the stone. 

It was always easier to focus when he was taking the draughts. The lyrium always gave him a sort of detached perspective on reality that served him well in situations such as this, where the churning in his stomach matches the tremors in his fingers and the sweat beading his hairline. Bile rises in the back of his throat, and before he knows what is happening, he’s turning into his wastebin and retching up what little he has been able to stomach that day. The back of his neck burns, and the armor on his back tightens and digs into his shoulders, so he fumbles for the buckles until it is wrenched off of him and cast into a corner. 

It’s not until the candles have burned themselves to nothing that he peels himself off the floor, and sets about assembling the bits of silverite on their proper stand. And then, without much else to do in the dark office, Cullen goes to bed. 

Or, at the very least, he lies horizontally on his mattress as he stares up at the hole in his ceiling, and wonders if he should really take up Josephine’s offer to cover it up. Panes of glass perhaps would do him better than the hasty tarp they had up in the spring to shield against the rains. Maeve had offered to put the requisition in time and time again, and of course he had waved her off. But then again that had been before she woke up one, two, however many times with a stuffy nose and her hair a riot of frizzy damp curls that made him laugh. 

Maeve. It seems he’s incapable of going more than a minute without his mind seeking her out - a moth ever drawn to flame. How stupid had he been just a few days ago to think he could write a letter and be done with her? That she would be done with him? Fool. Even when faced with certain danger in the form of a bitter ex-Templar with no land nor titles to his name, Inquisitor Trevelyan is fearless. 

One day she will realize his weakness, of this Cullen is sure, but for now he is weaker than ever and cannot, will not , fail her again. 

He won’t sleep this night, not feeling like this–like his skin has shifted a centimeter to the left, just enough to be uncomfortable. He won’t sleep, but perhaps he can close his eyes for just one – 

– only to jolt awake with a garbled shout caught in his throat, and bloody stone walls scorched into the back of his eyelids. For a long moment, he’s not sure where he is broken swords on the ground, crushed bones under a demon’s foot, fangs cutting through iron, a body at his feet with red hair and blue eyes and a glowing green palm and in his hand is a sword aflame no no no what has he done? The room swims around him through barely open eyes, moonlight coming in through the big circular windows of the tower library. 

And then–

A hand on his shoulder, long-fingered and soft. The smell of vanilla and roses. He’s not alone. 

“Cullen, wake up.”

His eyes fly open at once. Maeve is crouched at the side of the bed; even through the dappled moonlight and shadow sweeping in from above he can see how pale she is and the lines around her eyes that surely weren’t there a few hours ago. 

“Do you know where you are?” 

Hole in the ceiling, trunk at the foot of his bed, feather mattress beneath him. Her, alive. 

“Skyhold,” he croaks and pushes himself up to a sitting position. His shirt sticks to him with sweat and when Cullen looks at his palms, he can see little half-moon imprints where his nails have dug in. 

It takes a moment for him to stop his chest from heaving, his heart from hammering that desperate beat. Cullen’s limbs feel shackled to the bed frame; his gaze cannot stop darting from her face to the sky above. For some reason, all he can focus on is the little birthmark just to the left of her nose, the one that she always complains looks like a speck of dirt caught on her cheeks. She’s wearing a heavy cloak that she now draws tighter against the evening chill as she searches his face for something, not looking exactly pleased nor angry. 

“What are you doing here?” He rasps out, still looking down at his hands. 

Maeve shrugs one shoulder under the cloak. “Couldn’t sleep, could I?” She hesitates for another few seconds before she murmurs, “Bad dream?”

“Aren’t they always?” 

“Do you need some water?” 

Cullen shakes his head and now moves to swing his legs over the side of the bed; against his bare feet, the stone floor is frigid. “Just some fresh air, I think.” 

“Okay,” and she stands as well, adjusting the cloak around her. “Let’s make use of that scrap you refer to as a balcony.” 

He blinks at her, startled for a moment. “You don’t have too–” 

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Maeve says tiredly and holds her hand out to him. “Some clean air will do us both some good.” 

It’s true, the little balcony is really no more than a bit of stone overlooking the inner courtyard with a wall of stone columns to keep anyone from tipping overboard. It’s just big enough for the two of them to lean over at the same time, though their feet still firmly remain in the main room. If anyone were to look over – they’d notice an odd pair, surveying the empty keep at such a late hour. Or early, depending on one’s perspective. The Commander with his jacket and boots hastily pulled on; the Inquisitor, cloak over her silky nightdress and slippers. 

Maeve isn’t quite touching him, her hand resting a few touches away from his to gaze out in quiet contemplation. Below them, an evening patrol passes through the training yard, torches held alight sending dancing shadows across the ground, before they round a corner and disappear.

Someone sighs, and he’s not quite sure if it's her or him. He casts her a sideways look at her to find her rummaging in her cloak pockets for something. Then she draws out a little copper tin, pops it open, and withdraws a cigarette. 

“I didn’t know you smoked,” he says, not bothering to hide his frown.

“I don’t,” Maeve replies but holds it out to him all the same. “You want one? It’s just elfroot.” When he continues to stare at her in obvious skepticism she rolls her eyes, then places the cigarette between her teeth. Against her pink lips, the roll is bone white. “Blame Garrett Hawke, alright? It helps. Varric isn’t any better. Do you want one or not?” 

She taps her fingers against the end of the cigarette and it immediately lights, casting shadows up her cheeks. What lyrium does remain in his blood tingles a bit at the casual use of magic, and the hairs on the back of his neck raise. Even as the embers light and the warmth grows, Cullen cannot help but shiver. 

“Alright, pass it along,” he mutters and, with the smallest of smiles, she dutifully hands it over. Cullen hasn’t smoked in years, and even then it was a rare occasion only found in Kirkwall taverns between pints of ale. But the elfroot is milder than the nettle the initiates used to smuggle in, and he sends a swirl of smoke into the air to drift away into the night sky.

“Cullen?”

He passes the cigarette back to Maeve, finding her already looking sideways to him, pale eyes seeming almost silver in the moonlight. A beat of silence. 

“I’m so sorry.” 

“You’ve already apologized, Mae. I’ve accepted it.” 

“I know, but I don’t think I said it the way I meant to before. And I wanted to tell you again. Because it’s true. I don’t know what I was thinking….” 

She turns, still keeping careful distance between them, but now she is facing him fully; the wind winds strands of hair around her and across her face as she balances the lit cigarette between two fingers. Cullen’s chest tightens, a whisper of panic flitting through him before it’s chased out the window once more. Stop that. Maeve is steady; Cullen knows this better than any other truth. If he panics if she so much as looks at him, he might as well resign now. 

“Thank you,” he says quietly. “I feel like I…I should apologize too. For everything.” 

Maeve hums, low in her throat, before taking another drag. “We’ve done a lot of apologizing these last few weeks. Poor habit to have.“

“Apologizing?” 

“Fighting. I didn’t want to go to bed angry. Not with you.” 

“You can be angry with me,” Cullen tells her truthfully and watches as the smooth skin between her brows knits together. “I have…done a great deal wrong in my life.”

“Not to me,” she murmurs, and he aches more than anything in the world to believe her.

I truly am sorry, he thinks, and hopes that she knows it is not just for tonight, but for last week and the many nights before then that have surely ended with her quiet disappointment in him. But it doesn’t have to be this way–and he thinks about the way her hands felt on him and her lilting Marcher voice, pulling him out of yet one more nightmare.

No more running, he’d told himself. 

Cullen takes a deep breath, ignoring the creaks in his joints and the rattle in his bones, and then says, “I have to tell you something. About Kinloch.” He watches as her expression ticks into surprise, then dismay.

“Oh-sweetheart, I don’t want you to feel like you have to–”

“No,” he interrupts, running a hand through his hair nervously. “No, it has to be now. If I don’t do it now then I’m afraid I never will. You…you need to know. If I’m going to begin to untangle all of this, I’ll need–I want your help. If you have the time.”

The frown deepens as her mouth slopes firmly downward. “Maker’s mercy, what makes you think I would not have time for you?” 

“It’s the middle of the night for one, and–” 

“Cullen.” 

Her sweet man, Cullen reminds himself. Hers. He’s hers. She’s here and she’s not leaving and she’s still holding him and he’s hers. 

Maeve takes one final drag of the cigarette before stubbing it out against the stone wall. “Shall I make some tea?” 

“Better idea. I’ve got whiskey downstairs.” 

Cullen feels more than a little wretched following her down the ladder to his office. He watches Maeve for a second, his eyes tracking her long fingers as she shrugs her cloak off, then as she crosses to a bookshelf to pull a decanter of amber liquid down. He folds himself into on one end of the lounge sofa shoved into one corner of the room that someone, likely her or Josephine, had unceremoniously moved to his tower a few months ago. Bit by bit the iron grip on his chest loosens, yet he feels as he often does when his silverite armor is removed and it is just him before her as a mortal man: utterly exposed. 

A hand nudges his shoulder. Her, offering him a lowball. 

“Thank you,” he murmurs, taking it from her; the glass stings against his ice cold palms. He squeezes his eyes shut as he throws it all back in one–down his throat, the alcohol burns. 

“Too strong?” ” Maeve asks as slips onto the sofa next to him, long legs drawn up under her as she settles.

“Josephine is right, as usual. Antivans never miss.”

She hums under her breath, but doesn’t speak again, waiting patiently for him to speak. Cullen isn’t quite as panicked as he was before–the terror has dissipated but the self-loathing has not. Cullen is left feeling more awkward around her than he has in months. Tongue too big for his mouth, words fumbling and unsure. But he is here because he cares for her more than anything in his life, and he wants–he wants to fix this. 

“There’s no hurry,” she says when he is quiet for a moment too long.

“I know but… I’ve never… I’ve never told anyone ,” Cullen finds himself confessing bitterly. “The Order knew…some details but not…” 

He hears the clink of her glass resting against the floor, then feels the pads of her fingers brush his arm, asking silently. But he will always grant her this request, something in his chest sliding back into its proper place when he turns his hands over, palms up on the patterned fabric of the couch so that she may entwine her fingers through his. His hands are blunt instruments compared to hers: his nails ragged where she keeps them clean and neat; his knuckles scratched where hers are smooth. He has never heard her play piano, but she says she was good. It’s not hard to believe her with hands as delicate as hers. 

“I’m here,” she says simply, eyes so kind and gentle on him. Maker, he hopes this isn’t the last time he touches her.

They sit in silence, awkwardness fading as Cullen parses through the words. There is no one place to begin, no way to cut out the ugly parts in lieu of something better. It merely was and it merely is, and so he begins with, “I was sixteen when I was identified for officer training, so I arrived at Kinloch as a Knight-Corporal rather than Knight. So I was–” He pauses, running through the words in his head, not wanting to misspeak. “I oversaw the mages more directly than I would have on a typical guard rotation. Classes, lectures, that sort of thing. And, um, there was a girl.” 

Maeve’s eyebrows fly up. “A girl? Another templar?” 

Cullen’s mouth is dry, filled with sand and dirt and choking him from within. “No… No, she was a mage. It was…youthful infatuation on my part.” 

“You don’t seem like the type to bend the rules,” Maeve murmurs. Her fingers rub gentle circles on his calloused palms, so soothing in their back-and-forth, back-and-forth. It holds him to this room.

Cullen huffs a laugh, bitterness caught in every edge. “Believe me, I was terrified of her. I’d had schoolyard crushes as a boy, but she was the first that made me…want things.” 

His cheeks burn at the memory of himself as a far younger man, imagining himself with a pretty girl right under the Knight-Commander’s nose. More than a few mornings had started with him trying to hide evidence of his dreams, desperately trying to avoid his fellows’ laughter. A face long forgotten to history swims to the forefront of his mind–green eyed, dark haired, mahogany brown skin. A tinkling laugh across a quiet library. 

“What was her name?” 

“Surana. She was from the alienage in Highever, I think. Very talented spirit healer. I oversaw her Harrowing, actually… Fastest in the Circle’s history.” 

“Impressive.” 

“She was.” 

Cullen has managed to hold on to few kind memories of the Ferelden Circle, too many of them lost to lyrium or the events during the Blight. But every now and then, a fractured bit will peak through. Most of the theory lectures naturally soared over his head, but the classes always fascinated him. Angharad Surana had been a star pupil, even at that young age, a command over her magic that surprised even the Enchanters. It was no question how she attracted his attention, wide-eyed and sheltered as he was. 

Back then magic was an exotic curiosity, even as the older knights whispered and grumbled just out of earshot. Naivety, Cullen later realized, and blind ignorance were what kept him from picking the lies from their conspiracy. 

“Anyways. I, ah, I didn’t talk to her much. But she was kind and pretty and I was very young. So when…” And now Cullen’s voice shudders, and his eyes involuntarily squeeze shut. Maeve’s hand on his tightens, and he clutches at her, grateful suddenly that she is there. “When the Circle fell and I was taken, they looked for ways to break us. I spent so long wondering why they didn’t just kill me. I still wonder about that.” 

“They found her…in my head,” he rasps out, eyes still firmly shut even as shadows dance against the back of his eyelids. Tooth and claw, sword and flame. The screams of his friends, and of his own. “Demons. Um. Quite a few of them.” 

He can’t look at Maeve, but her grip on him is iron. Cullen has never been a drinking man, but he wishes for another strong pour of the whiskey. Or maybe another smoke. 

“They made me think she wanted me in that way. Excited me. Violated me. But Surana didn’t–she never did.” He shrugs, releasing a wet laugh that bleeds freely with bitterness. “I didn’t matter to her. None of it mattered. When the Hero found me–when the Hero freed me, I found her body. She’d been dead for weeks. Killed by a Templar who thought she was possessed. But she wasn’t. She was just dead.” 

Cullen pauses to take another deep breath; now that he’s speaking, he can’t seem to stop. Words long trapped behind his teeth finally given voice. 

“Much of that time is lost to me. I don’t know when I realized it wasn’t real. I had heard others talk of…of sex. I didn’t think it was supposed to come with so much pain. So maybe that’s how I knew.” He pauses, and then looks to Maeve and it takes a moment for his blurry vision to focus. 

She’s not crying, but her eyes are wide and stricken in her pale face. For a long moment, she seems quite unable to speak, and so Cullen continues in a low voice.

“The Order doesn’t really have a…process for these sorts of situations. But it must have been in my file. Meredith knew, Bull knows,” he adds with a rueful laugh and Maeve’s eyebrows fly up. 

“Don’t ask,” Cullen says when she opens her mouth in outrage. “Not hard to imagine how the Ben-Hassarath got into the Chantry archive. He knows too much about us all, I’m sure.”

“Cullen,” Maeve says, aghast and horrified all in one. Her voice trembles, catching and stumbling in a way he’s rarely heard from her. “Cullen, he shouldn't have–you shouldn’t have to– oh sweetheart,” and now she is holding back tears. “Oh my love, I am so sorry.” 

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” He takes another breath. It’s funny, after so many years of this terrible moment living in his head, to have finally spoken the words out loud… He feels relieved, oddly. 

“Don’t apologize. Don’t even think about apologizing.” Maeve’s voice is thick but undeniably fierce as she clutches at his hand.

“It wasn’t fair to you,” Cullen says quietly. “You were trying to make me feel good and I-I messed it all up.”

Her eyes widen. “You’ve got it wrong. This isn’t about blame or fault. It’s about the fact that something very terrible happened to you and I…I didn’t know I was reminding you of–”

“ You are not reminding me,” Cullen cuts in sharply. “You are nothing like Uldred or Surana, and you’re certainly nothing like that demon filth. Don’t ever say something like that again.” 

Now she looks surprised, her mouth hanging open as her bottom lip trembles. But then she brings his hand in hers up to her mouth, and he lets her kiss the tops of his knuckles as she holds him to her cheek. “You’ve never spoken about...about any of this?” 

Cullen snorts and now he stands, untangling his hands from hers to pour himself another glass. “Who would listen? I suppose they think if they just don’t talk about incidents then it won’t give other circles inspiration. But I…struggled afterwards. A lot. I was angry and ashamed and-and I took it out on anyone around me. So they sent me to Greenfell.” 

“What’s Greenfell?” 

“Abby in the Bannorn for templars to…refocus, I guess. I wasn’t sure what that meant at the time, I know I just didn’t want a break. I just wanted–I wanted control,” Cullen confesses in a low voice as he eases himself back into the lounge chair. “Over mages. To make sure nothing like that ever happened again. I thought…I thought any of them could be possessed.” 

He risks meeting her gaze again, expecting to find judgement or even disgust, but finds none of it. Then again he thinks, Maeve is not a simple woman–surely she has pieced together enough of his life before the Inquisition to make some accurate assumptions. 

“Anyways,” Cullen says with a cough and tries not to think about her hot skin against his own, ice cold and trembling. “I should have been removed from the Order. But after the Blight we were stretched too thin. So they kept me, and just increased my lyrium.”

“How much?” Maeve asks quietly. 

“What?” 

“How much lyrium were they giving you?” 

Cullen bites back a grimace. “Ah, at that point it would have been… Twice more than standard. Until I made Knight-Captain and Meredith cut me down to a half doses. Officers take less,” he adds when Maeve looks alarmed, “to slow down the madness. Or at least that’s my theory.” 

Maeve bites her lower lip, and her fingers fidget when the lace frills of her nightdress, pulling on a loose string slowly unravelling. “Did it help? With the dreams?” 

“Yes,” Cullen says truthfully and takes a sip of the whiskey. It goes down easier this time, the drink curling into him with a warmth that manages to just cut through the tremble in his chest. “I didn’t have nightmares, but it also sort of…dulls you after a while. It made it easier to not think about anything. Because it didn’t matter as much.”

“Of course it matters–” Maeve begins and Cullen shakes his head. 

“I could do my job because I wasn’t thinking about it. But it was still there. I was terrified of them. Of the possibility that Kirkwall could go the same way as Kinloch. Except it had three times the mages and five times the crime and half the Order were lyrium-mad zealots, so it just seemed…inevitable. And then it fell apart all the same. Just in a different way than I expected.” 

She’s looking at him, still white-faced and concerned but there’s another edge sneaking into that expression–something contemplative that he’s all too used to. 

“What’s that look for?” 

Maeve’s long legs shift on the couch, moving from tucked under her to crossed on the floor at the ankles. She smooths the heavy wool of the cloak down, examining it for some hidden flaw as she chews on her lower lip until she suddenly looks up at him. Shrewd and rapt as her eyes scan his face. 

“I’m going to ask you something and I really need you to be honest with me, Cullen. I mean it.” 

He blinks at her, his brows furrowing at once in concern. Watched one of her free hands come up to worry at a long tendril of her hair. Out of her braids, it reaches nearly to her waist, springy and coiled in a way she makes look effortless compared to the riot Cullen has to wrestle with every morning. It takes him a moment to set the lowball glass next to hers on the stone floor, but then he’s turning on the lounge to face her fully; his knees sit mere inches away from hers. There is a sudden gulf between them, miles deep, and the other side is full of fear. 

“I would never lie to you. Never.”

Maeve huffs out a breath, evidently coming to a decision. ““Alright then. Are you frightened of me?” 

All of the air leaves Cullen’s chest in one great heave, as if he’s been kicked squarely in the stomach by a particularly heavy boot. But Maeve’s gaze is drifting somewhere past his shoulder, far away past the stone walls and heavy maps; his breath is trapped at the bottom of his lungs. 

“Have I given you reason to think that?” Cullen asks after a long moment, not sure he wants to hear the answer but knowing he needs to ask. In his chest, his heart is picking up that panicked drum, sending tremors straight down to his fingernails.

“If you think I’m–” Maeve cuts herself off and looks away; she’s still winding a finger through one lock of hair. “This isn’t a Circle. You may not be a templar anymore, but I will always be a mage.” 

“Mae,” Cullen says, feeling utterly heartbroken, and now she looks at him. And he reaches, slow enough for her to stop him, for her hand caught in her hair. She does not stop him as he takes it in both of his hands, her pale knuckles just peaking through the gaps in his battered ones. 

“You are the most important person in my life,” he tells her, not breaking eye contact even once. He needs her to understand this, if nothing else. “Somehow I can see twenty, thirty years from now and it’s you-it’s always you. You are my home. Magic is, and will always be I fear, a complicated thing for me. But you play no part in that, I can promise you.” 

“So when you Smited me in our bed,” Maeve asks softly, not pulling her hand from his grasp. “You promise it wasn’t because some part of your mind feared me to be a demon?” 

He swallows; Maeve’s tired eyes track the movement and still she doesn’t move to stop touching him. 

“I don’t know,” Cullen admits quietly and her head dips to her chest. “Maybe.” 

Maker, please. If he may be a selfish man just once, let him be selfish enough to keep her. 

“We don’t have to have sex,” Maeve says. Her voice is no higher than a whisper; anything louder would shatter against their eardrums in the quiet night of his office. “I enjoy what we have and what we do, but I’m not with you for the sex. I’ve got a low enough drive myself, it wouldn't be… Well, it would be a conversation. But not impossible.” 

“I don’t want to stop having sex,” Cullen says at once, clutching at her hand with sudden fierceness. “I just need a…I just need a minute.” He doesn’t say for how long - how could he know? 

“I can give you all the minutes you need,” she murmurs. Her other hand moves to cover his own on hers so she may wind their fingers together, simple and easy. “You deserve pleasure, duck. No more feeling like you have to punish yourself.” 

The ever burning match in his chest swells to a bonfire; the air missing from his lungs seeps back in and he manages, somehow, to take a breath. 

“Can I kiss you?” She asks, still so quiet, and when he nods she leans closer to kiss his cheek, the corner of his mouth, his chapped lips. He can still still taste the salt of her tears on her cheeks, and when he pulls away, he finds that he is crying as well. 

When he opens his eyes some hours later, it is to a dawn sun and a heavy weight on his back. Maeve snores still, her chest pressed to his back as she drapes herself over him, graceful even in sleep as her body unconsciously slots against him with an ease that only comes after many nights together. Her arm around his middle is warm, her fingers finding the gap between his nightshirt and trousers to tickle the soft hairs across his stomach.  If he were to hold his breath and concentrate, he would be able to feel the tickle of her eyelashes against his skin. 

His head feels as though it’s stuffed full of wool and the crook of his right shoulder aches something awful, and yet – Cullen cannot help but smile. 

Chapter Text

Cullen has to force himself to look at the healer directly. He’s a grumpy older elf with little more than a thatch of white hair on both the top of his head and out of his ears. Presently the man is stacking a bunch of herbs and grumbling to himself about, of all things, the particular type of mince the cook has gone and put in her pies. 

He’s only here for one reason. He’d promised Maeve just before she’d left for the Emprise that he’d do it after weeks of thinking about it, and weeks of telling her he’d find the time, and weeks of not doing very much at all. 

“I’m not trying to tell you what to do,” she’d said as she folded a pair of woolen socks into her pack. Scouts warned that Emprise du Lion was bitterly cold, especially now as fall winds swept through the highlands. Josephine went and had new cloaks made for the whole party before they departed, to which Maeve protested indignantly about the cost and waste of resources. Later, he had watched as she absentmindedly petted at the soft fennec fur, long fingers hidden amongst the strands. 

“I know you’re not,” he’d murmured from his position sitting on her couch, an untouched plate of food on the side table and a stack of reports balanced on his thigh. He’s here on her insistence that he get out of his office more, even if the unfiltered light streaming in through her windows stung at his eyes and nudged forcefully at the headache blooming in some cavern behind his right eye. “You… You’re right. I should.” 

She’d paused in the act of buckling one of her packs shut, one hand fiddling with a shiny gold fastener while she looked at him rather pensively. “Do you want me to come?” 

“What?” 

“I’m serious.” Maeve released the buckle and turned fully to face him, resting slightly on the side of the bed.  “I’ve just realized I’ve never offered…if you’d like me to come with you to talk to the healers.” 

Cullen had felt sudden such a rush of affection for her in that moment that all he could do was blink at her for a long moment. “I… Thank you, Mae. But I think - I think this is something I need to do myself.” 

“Well - “ And then she had offered him a small smile as she turned back to her packing. “If you change your mind. I’ll just be gone six weeks. You’ll hardly know I’ve left.” 

And so he finds himself here in the infirmary, hovering between two empty cots as he tries to catch the healer’s eye. There’s a duo of young recruits on the far end of the hall watching him shift from foot to foot, and Cullen feels a fool. 

“Um - “ 

“Yes, Commander, I do see you standing there,” the elf says, not looking up from his herbs even once. “Just a moment.” 

“I just - “ 

“A moment, ser.” 

Cullen feels rather chastised and rather like this is already going poorly, but he’s here and he’s committed and so obediently waits until the healer is done. The recruits along the hall are whispering to each other, but a scowl in their direction sends them scurrying shamefaced back to their duties. 

“Now - “ The healer, who Cullen distantly remembered was named Dedwydd, turns to him and smiles not unkindly and says, “What can I do you for, Commander?” 

“Ah, yes - I had hoped - perhaps privately - “ 

It’s not until Dedwydd has beckoned him into a private little room off to the main hall and deposited him on a chair that Cullen finds himself finally at a loss for words, not sure where to start. But Healer Dedwydd is waiting with his hands clasped in his lap, looking at him expectantly. 

And so he takes a breath, wills his leg to stop its frantic bouncing up and down, and begins with “I think I need some help.” 

Healer Dedwydd does not say much as Cullen stumbles through a semblance of an explanation as to why he’s come here today, just nods and thinks and asks a few clarifying questions here or there. But when Cullen mentions lyrium, the elf’s eyes widen in alarm. 

“When did you stop taking it?” 

“I started tapering doses last summer, but didn’t stop fully until this past Wintermarch. After we lost the rest of the stock at Haven.” 

“And who’s been supervising your withdrawals?’ 

“I - well - Seeker Pentaghast - “ 

“Notably not a healer,” Dedwydd says reproachfully. “I’m not an expert on lyrium, but I’ve spent enough of my life in a Circle to know its effects. Respectfully, ser, it’s a wonder you’re not dead.” 

“I know,” Cullen says quietly. 

“How is your sleep? Appetite?”

“It’s…been better…” 

“Your troops say you spend all day locked in that tower.” 

“Been listening to the gossip mill, then?” Cullen asks, far more snappish than he intended and he’s about to apologize when Dedwydd chuckles. 

“Not much to listen to ‘round here except for it. No one is worse at keeping their mouths shut than a barrack full of soldiers.” 

He continues as he reaches for a leaf of parchment. “As for the sexual dysfunction - “ and here Cullen cannot hide a wince that the elf sees in full view. 

“There are some options,” Dedwydd says gently, and begins jotting down notes. Half an hour later, when Cullen leaves the infirmary he is armed with a list of herbs to request at the apothecary and an order to institute both a regular sleep schedule and regular meals, even if it’s just a bit of bread and meat. 

C - 

I am delighted to report that I have finally gotten Dorian to admit his cheating at chess, though less enthused to add that it was only after he’d trussed me thrice in a row. Still, you may use me as witness next time you should want to play him and he insists that he only plays fairly. Watch for his left sleeve - he likes to hide a rook there for safe keeping. 

Still, enough of these frivolities. I should really be asking after you. This should have come with a package - sweets that I know you will love and a a bit of Prophet’s Laurel (brew with your tea on cold mornings, it will help with stiff knees). Do not mention the sweets to Varric, he can and will insist on stealing them for himself. But I hope they bring a smile upon your face, as they did to mine. 

It’s not yet been two weeks and I already miss being at your side. Cassandra is not nearly as warm as you are, and twice as grumpy before dawn if you can believe. 

All my love, 

M

M -

Do remind me to tell you of the mornings in Haven before you joined us. She, Leliana and I all shared a cabin (most improper, I was assured, though the girls thought it funny) and I do believe Cassandra would fare better in the mornings should she stop snoring so much. I’m hardly a professional but I don’t think it’s helping. 

I have received your package, sweets intact. Thank you - they are lovely and it is kind of you to think of me. If only I had something in return to send, but I doubt Mrs. Porter’s pies will hold up well in travel. 

My health is  I am  I went to the healers. They have given me some options that may help, and a potion recipe that I have copied here for you to read. It is foul tasting, but already, I am feeling a bit more myself - something I was not sure I would ever be again. It feels foolish to hope this will last, but this time I am more certain. 

Already I long for your return. You cannot know how much I think of you when you are away. It feels constant. 

Love, 

C 

C - 

No pies, but you did take the time to press flowers? Do my eyes lie, or are these the same camellias that grow in the box just outside our balcony? 

I am glad you are feeling better. Will you have time for dinner the night I return? 

♡ M 

M -

Our balcony? If we are thinking of the same room at the top of the same tower…then yes they are the same. I’d hope you would be happy to see some of home while you’re in Orlais. 

My evening, as well as all my days, are yours. I do look forward to it. 

♡ C

The mornings taste differently now, somehow. No bitterness clawing at the back of his throat for once, and no nausea rolling in his stomach before he's even sat up straight.

It’s curious what a few hours solid sleep will do for one’s senses, Cullen is realizing. He’s spent months patently refusing sleeping draughts from the others, but it seems whatever Dedwydd has given him brings him to sleep quicker without the mind fog that he so feared with the draughts. 

His dreams are still stalked by nightmares, but Cullen has long accepted that they will always be there despite his best wishes otherwise. Especially with Maeve in the Emprise where so many Red Templars lie in waiting. Still, a walk about the castle in the afternoons with Rylen when before he would lock the doors and burn candles to a stub seem to help somewhat. Crisp mountain air in his lungs to clear his head, not that Cullen exactly followed what magic or science caused that. 

The Iron Bull notices of course and he hopes the qunari might not mention it at all but of course Bull is Bull which means he can’t himself from opening his big mouth, particularly when Cullen is involved. 

“You know,” he begins slowly one late morning as they’re both observing troops in the valley beneath Skyhold. Or, really, Cullen is observing them and the Iron Bull, instead of correcting sword form as he's supposed to, has sidled up to him nonchalantly to bother the commander at work. 

“What?” Cullen sighs. 

“Nothing.” He can practically hear the Iron Bull’s shit-eating grin though he refuses to look over. “It’s just that this is the first time I’ve ever seen you looking not like Death warmed over. Or, that guy Death forgot about and just left here on the brink of just absolutely - “ 

“Did you come here to say something worthwhile,” Cullen interrupts, rubbing the bridge between his eyes. “Or to just annoy me?” 

“Easy, Cullen,” Bull chides good naturedly. “Day isn’t even half over yet, no use getting your panties in a twist.” 

“I don’t wear - “ 

“You look good,” Bull says, suddenly sounding very genuine. “Is what I meant. Nothing else.” 

“Oh.” Cullen blinks, and then finally looks over to the qunari to find him staring back with his arms crossed over his chest. It’s the sort of look on his face that he’s sure Bull intends to be encouraging, but with the scars and the eyepatch it still comes across rather alarming.

“Thank…thank you, Bull,” he finally says. “I mean it - “ Cullen adds when Bull doesn’t move. “You were right about - well, when we - when you - it helped. I think,” he finishes rather awkwardly. 

Bull squints down at him for another long moment but then his face breaks out into a toothy grin that brightens him but does little to quell Cullen's nerves. “Ah, you just needed a little push. Good, I’m glad. Boss was getting so damn depressed that my next step would have been kicking your ass halfway back to Kirkwall. Happy it didn’t come to that.”

Cullen is glad for that too. He’s reasonably confident he can take Bull in a fight… Reasonably. 

Cassandra is the next one to say something. They’re in the middle of a friendly spar - something they used to do in the beginning of the Inquisition, but not for a long while. He’d asked her to get it back on the books just a few days after Maeve left - the Seeker had looked relieved, almost. 

“You’re keeping up contact with the Inquisitor?” The Seeker asks between bouts. In her hand is a wooden staff, a simple weapon for such friendly fighting, and she's stripped out of her armor for this. They've been at it for nearly a half hour, sweat dripping off the back of both their necks as the sun beats down on them.

“Yes,” Cullen replies, twirling his own staff around lazily. “Still tasked with sending reports on me?” 

“Careful now,” Cassandra warns before she launches herself at him with a grunt. He parries, wood sharply smacking against wood, and then takes a few of his own steps back just out of her reach. 

“You cannot blame the Inquisitor for her concern,” she continued as she prowled the opposite end of the circle. “Do not think I have not noticed your own foolish disregard for your health.” 

Bang. Smack. Whack!

“But I have not needed to send a negative report,” Cassandra said, panting now a little bit. She’s smarting from a jab to her leg, and Cullen feels a bruise of his own forming over his ribs. “You appear to be doing better, my friend.” 

“I went to the healers,” Cullen admits, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. These talks with Cassandra used to be constant, in the early days of his recovery - as the work has picked up, they have fallen to the wayside. He misses them, as he misses his friendship with the Seeker. Yet another thing to add to his remediation list. 

“It has been…more beneficial than I thought it would be,” Cullen says, frowning down at the dirt beneath their feet. “I feel like an ass for avoiding it for so long.” 

“You should,” Cassandra said bluntly and he cannot help but bark out a surprised laugh. “I am not glad for your suffering, but I am glad that she has guided you to them, despite my many, many suggestions of the same.” 

“I have always appreciated your counsel,” Cullen says softly. “And your friendship, though perhaps I have not always shown it well. When I first started tapering my draughts… I do not think I would be here if not for you. I’ll always be in your debt for that.” 

“The debt is long repaid,” Cassandra said with a wave of her hand. “I am only glad to see you are in good health. As is she, I’m sure…“ 

“Stop that.” 

Cassandra’s smile is a wicked thing, somehow proud and more salacious than Cullen would expect from a woman who not last week spent ten minutes staring with horror at a drunken Iron Bull as he spoke about his, uh, particular interest in dragons. 

“You’ll notice I didn’t say anything.” 

“You’ve been reading Varric’s books again.” He takes some joy the way her face contorts in mortification and cannot help but laugh as he swings his staff and begins again. 

Still, some nights he cannot sleep. Though this has less to do with the lyrium song, he thinks, and more to do with, well, himself. Cullen has always spent a little too much time preoccupied with his own worries, so much that it drove Mother mad even when he was very young. Too anxious about what Father might say about this or that, or what Joetta the baker’s daughter thought of his hair and perhaps she might like it better if he were to cut it? 

This night has very little to do with childhood concerns and everything to do with the woman battling red templars across Orlais. Most days he longs to be out there with her, with anyone. The few times he has traveled, to Caer Bronach and of course to Adamant, they have been rife with worry and battles, but he has privately enjoyed being on the front. Holding the line with his men, finding purpose with his own sweat and blood instead of being chained to his desk all day. 

This Cullen thinks to himself as he slips out of his tower and makes for the main keep. A few passing patrols murmur greetings to him as they pass. It is not such an unusual sight to see the Commander awake in the dead of night, but his destination is a new one, at least under these circumstances. 

Maeve’s quarters feel different when she is not here. Cooler, yes, with the hearth not lit and the curtains drawn firmly over the expansive windows, but it smells different too. When he takes a deep breath in, he smells mountain air and settling dust, not her perfume or the dried Arbor's Blessing she keeps over the doors. It’s too dark in here, and Cullen makes for one of the windows to pull the curtains back. Outside, the mountains sprawl under a velvet sky. 

Some of the staff have been in here to keep things tidy whilst she is away, Cullen notes, by the freshly swept floors and clean pressed sheets on the bed, but they have missed (or perhaps came before) Sera’s gift. A crude drawing pinned to Maeve’s vanity and - is that supposed to be him? 

He rips it away at once, as if someone would walk in any minute and see such a thing, and then feels immediately foolish for thinking so. The elf is no friend of his or Maeve’s, and some days he is surprised she has stayed with them so long, but surely this has been planted for his or Maeve’s embarrassment… Cullen spares it once more glance, wondering faintly how such a position is even possible for two humans, before he balls it up and tosses it into the wastebin. 

It’s odd being in here without her. Cullen isn’t sure he ever has, but standing in the middle of the moonlit bathed room, some of the tension that had found home at the base of his skull and between his shoulder blades starts to leave. Already this place, this room, he feels…better. 

Cullen doesn’t overthink climbing into her bed. Their bed? Her last letter implied the space that was given to her was now…shared. He’ll have to ask her upon her return to be sure lest he assume something wrong. Sharing quarters was for more than lovers, it was for families and partners.

But then again, she had called herself his partner. The word fits better than suitor or courter, Cullen muses to himself as he sinks into the pillows. Between the heavy woven quilts and Orlesian silk sheets, he can almost imagine her here, tinkering away at her desk over one final report before she turns in for the night. She would smell of her hair oil, some sage concoction Josephine had procured, and the curls would tumble down her back in a loose wave. He loves to brush her hair, even if just with his fingers. It’s a bizarre intimacy he had never imagined for himself, but of course the last eight months have been full of those. 

She would slip into bed beside him, wearing one of those nightgowns Cullen shouldn’t find as attractive as he does. The one with the wide neck and practically sheer skirt that, when the candle light catches her just right, it illuminates every line and curve of her body. 

Cocooned in her sheets, Cullen is drifting to sleep faster than he intended but he’s aware enough to notice his cock twitch to attention in his small clothes. He licks his lips, trying to ignore it. 

With the amount of times he’s let himself happily observe her in the bath or, Maker’s breath, panting underneath him, he can imagine it pretty clearly.  

The long stretch of her limbs, so soft less than a year ago but now strung with hard-won muscle and peppered with scars. The color of her skin, flushed and damp with sweat. Her breasts are small enough that he can hold one fully in his hand, the skin impossibly fair against his sun-damaged and scarred skin. Her nipples, dusky pin and pebbled in the cold mountain air. Her teeth, white against pretty lips. 

His hand is drifting before he even really thinks about it. How long as it been since he’s touched himself like this? Ages. He simply hadn’t the time, or the…want, in all honestly. Before there had been no reason and now, he has her, doesn’t he? 

Except that she is hundreds of miles away, asleep in the tent she shares with Cassandra. Or perhaps she is awake as he is, frantically trying to keep quiet as she has a hand down her trousers. Cassandra is a heavy sleeper and would not wake if she kept her mouth shut. Or maybe, fearing the risk too greatly, she's stepped away from camp, finding a quiet spot beneath the trees to rub at herself. 

Maker's breath, he shouldn’t think such obscene things. How about he just stops and perhaps he can just - 

She’d wanted to put her mouth on him. She’d asked and he’d fled, but now… Her mouth would be maybe the warmest thing he’s ever felt, second only to her cunt around him. She'd swallow him down and as she did so, her tongue would press him up to the roof of her mouth. There would be a reverence in her touch, some special gentleness she manages to save for him in a life full of hardship. 

Cullen moans, too loud except that it’s just him - alone in her tower. He can’t believe he’s doing this, but it’s just - it’s been so long and she’s not due back for another few weeks, and now he’s hard and he’s leaking and he’s going to make a mess if he doesn’t figure out what to do in the next five seconds. 

Fuck it.

Bringing his hand back up, Cullen spits in his palm, quick and dirty, while the other shoves his smallclothes halfway down his thighs. A moment later he has a hand wrapped around himself and his eyes shut in pure pleasure. He sighs softly at his own touch - he’s so hard already. Maker, how long has it been since he’s been this hard that quickly? 

The callouses on his hand feel good against the hot length of his arousal, sending tingles though Cullen’s entire body, like a hundred electric shocks being administered all at once. Except instead of pain, as perhaps he’d learn to expect from a mage’s touch, there is only pleasure. 

Maeve settles between his legs, one hand balanced on his hips to keep him down, the other reaching for him, squeezing his balls as her head bobs rhythmically. 

He swears under his breath, mostly to stop himself from groaning her name out loud. Patrols passed through her tower every hour, they could - they would - they would hear. Cullen’s hand picks up the pace before he’s even finished the thought, some perverted part of his mind latching on to the idea of someone being so close while he’s caught like this. His thumb slides over the head of his cock, heavy and thick between his legs, and fuck he’s leaking like a damned waterfall. 

“That’s good, duck. Does that feel ok?” The wet suck of her mouth at him is the most vulgar thing he’s ever heard and he can’t even look down at her because he know that will finish him right then and there, her lips stretched around him as she - 

Cullen pants, hitching his hips up to fuck his own fist harder, wet like her mouth will be when she’s returned, when she’s back at Skyhold, when she’s home and he can finally look her in the eyes and tell her he’s ready, he wants this, he wants her - 

“Good boy.” 

That does it. With a shudder, he spills over his hand, nearly crying out with the rush of his orgasm. His hips keep moving, greedy, as he chases the lingering fantasy, thrusting up until it’s too much and he lets go with a gasp that turns into another moan. 

“Fucking hell,” Cullen pants out loud, sagging back onto the bed. Around him, the room comes back into focus, the cool air whispering against his heated skin once more. The quarters look far too pristine considering how utterly destroyed he feels, still sprawled against the sheets as cum dries on his stomach. He’s made a mess, he’ll have to figure out something to tell the staff, oh Maker he was worried about patrols but the staff. They’ll know he was - that he did - that was - 

Well…shit.