Note: Yes, there is a completely anachronistic quote in here. Just pretend it was something a Theodosian queen said, instead of an English one.


Life, Cullen thought as he watched Kill settle her cuirass and shrug her shoulders twice, is definitely good.

He still woke each morning with a sense of wonder to find her in his arms, legs twined with his, her head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder — still felt delighted disbelief each time she muttered a complaint about the breeze through the gap in the wall and heaved the blankets higher over both of them, encouraging him with lips and hands to raise the temperature.

Still thanked the Maker and Andraste to see her strong and healthy body as she rose from his bed.

Kill ducked her chin to her shoulder and tugged at her spaulder lacing and Cullen stretched out a hand. "Come here. Let me get that."

"I'll forget how to dress myself soon," Kill said, sitting on the edge of the bed and leaning over to bring the recalcitrant lacing within his reach.

"If you were a chevalier or a knight you'd have a squire to do this for you," Cullen pointed out, tightening the fastening. "Other side."

She turned, grinning. "If I were a chevalier or a knight I'd have to worry about Sera stealing my breeches."

Cullen pretended to give that serious consideration as he laced her other shoulder, checked the set of her gorget. "Still not seeing a problem," he said gravely, and Kill snorted.

"Speaking of breeches, shouldn't you put yours on?" She gave him a look that heated his cheeks. "Not that I don't appreciate the view, but her Worship might consider you a little under-dressed for the War Room."

He sighed. "Yes." And then, impulsively. "Let's run away somewhere."

"And leave all this?" Kill said dryly, with a glance at the still-unrepaired gaps in the wall and roof.

"Yes. We could go … anywhere. Back to Kirkwall. Denerim."

"Swords for hire?" Her voice held a hint of distaste — mercenaries were often only one short step up from outright bandits.

"Not necessarily," Cullen said. He rolled out of bed and started hunting for his clothes.

"Oh, hang up our swords and go keep nugs in Crestwood?"

He blinked. "Nugs?"

Kill tossed his shirt to him. "Rams. Druffalo. Anything. Can you see me, herding livestock? Or learning a craft, at my age?"

"No," Cullen said, smiling at the mental image. "Not really. But there are other things. Local administration, merchants … "

Kill made a rude gesture. "That for your desk job. I'm a soldier, same as you. However many times who I'm soldiering for changes, that never will."

He pulled on his shirt and breeches, then his arming doublet. "You'll have to stop, some time."

"We'll both have to stop, sometime." Kill held his cuirass ready for him and he ducked to let her slip it over his head. "You can fit all the fifty-year-old line fighters in Thedas in one bathtub. And you'll be fifty before me."

"Yes, but you …" He hesitated, with the sense that the conversation was sliding out of control.

"Have but the body of a weak and feeble woman?" Kill said, an edge to her voice. "Come down to the training yard later and see."

"There are differences," Cullen protested. "When — that is, you won't be able to keep fighting when you're, well. Expecting."

A moment's incomprehension and then sudden, utter shock on Kill's face. "Cullen —" Her voice cracked, and she swallowed, and tried again. "Cullen, that's not …"

He realised it wasn't something they'd discussed yet; realised too that he'd been assuming that discussion would be about when rather than if. "You don't want …?"

"Cullen." She closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them again her expression was bleak. "I thought you knew. I can't."

He struggled to understand. "Because of the — the damage, from Haven?" The topic they still danced around, her pain, his fault, slowly coming closer to the point where they might, perhaps, confront it head-on.

"No. I've never been — I went to the healer, when I first joined the Kirkwall Guard, to get a potion to … make sure against accidents. And she said I didn't need to worry, that something wasn't made right, inside. That I'd never need to worry about it. And … there were times, when if I could, I probably would have, but she was right. I never have."

"How could you think I knew?" Cullen asked, but even as he spoke, he remembered a dozen casual remarks over their time together, even back in Kirkwall: Killeen wincing at a wailing baby and saying Thank the Maker that's not something I'll ever have to put up with; or describing herself as constitutionally unmaternal. He'd assumed she referred to her preferences — assumed, too, that now they were so gloriously, happily, together that those preferences would change, that that she would want, as he did, for them to become us, become a family. There were precautions that could be taken, by women or by couples together: they hadn't taken any of them, and as much as he'd considered it, he'd thought ...

"I'm sorry," Kill said tonelessly. "I'm so sorry, Cullen. If you want — I can't give you —" She turned to go.

He crossed the room before she could reach the ladder, stopped her with a hand on her arm, drew her into an embrace encumbered by both their armour. "I love you," he told her, first and most important truth, and then, first and most important lie: "It doesn't matter."