NSFW
26th Kingsway
They dragged the mattress off the ruins of the Champion's bedframe and remade the bed on the floor. Curled in it together in a nest of blankets, hands moving slowly over each other's bodies, they exchanged gentle kisses and wordless murmurs. Killeen kissed the scratches she'd left on Cullen's shoulders and back, ran her fingers softly over his bloodied lip as he caressed the bruises his grip had made on her hips and thighs. Trails of tingling heat followed the path of his fingers on her skin and she felt the ache in her belly rekindling, a tangle of pressure and tension and need wound together in a knot that drew her nerves tight as bowstrings.
"Cullen, please," she whispered, taking his wrist and trying to move his hand to between her legs. "Please, I need —"
The words, the thought, vanished in a gasp as he bent his head to her breast, tongue circling her nipple. She looked down to see him take his cock in his hand, stroking himself firmly until he hardened enough to settle himself between her legs and slide into her.
She was so sensitised, slick and swollen, that she came almost at once as he moved slowly in and out of her, came again a moment later, came a third time as Cullen found his own release with a gasp that might have been her name — a series of galvanic shudders that left her wrung out and limp and all but weeping with relief.
Cullen circled her shoulders with his arm and rolled them over so she rested on his chest. "Better?" he whispered, hand rubbing circles on her back.
"Yes," Killeen said wearily.
"Can we talk?" he asked, fingers still tracing those slow, soothing circles between her shoulder-blades.
"I don't want to argue any more tonight," Killeen said. She didn't think she could summon up the strength to move, let alone to fight with him any further. She wanted to lie here, warm and safe, until she slept. "Please."
"No arguing," Cullen agreed, running his fingers through her hair, finding a tangle and working it gently free.
"All right," Killeen said reluctantly.
A long pause, a soft kiss to her forehead. "You never used to take risks like this."
No arguing, Killeen reminded herself. Talking. "I did," she said. "I recall you pulling me out of the way of a blast of magefire that would have crisped me to kindling, once."
"I remember," Cullen said. "I thought you were going to break my jaw for it."
"I didn't know whether to hit you or kiss you senseless. I thought you'd gotten yourself killed until I looked up after the fight was done and saw you standing there," Killeen said, and paused. "I get the point."
"All right," Cullen said. He worked free another tangle. "If you'd kissed me, I might have dropped dead from shock."
Killeen turned her head to look at him. "Really?" she asked. "Did you really never know how much I wanted you?"
Cullen wrapped his arms around her and pulled up a little further up towards him, kissing her cheek. "I didn't have a clue how you felt until I woke up with my hand between your legs and you quite obviously enthusiastically enjoying it."
Killeen felt a flicker of remembered shame, pushed it aside firmly. He was awake. "You know," she said casually, "if that's really the case, we should play Wicked Grace together from time to time."
She felt his lips against her cheek curve into a smile. "I might be an idiot, but not to that degree."
"Did you …" Killeen hesitated, not sure if she wanted to know the answer. "Sometimes I thought that I … that you might have been interested, a little, back then."
"I wanted … Kill, I didn't know what I wanted. You, with me. To see you smile, to hear your terrible jokes." She opened her mouth to protest They're very good jokes and he kissed her to silence. "For you to touch my face, the way you did that night, to hold you, to be held. Beyond that …" He shook his head.
"Because of Kinloch."
"All I knew of …" He paused, and even through the ache the thought of his pain caused her, Killeen was amused to see him still hesitate, blush, and choose a more seemly word. "Of intimacy was … not something anyone would wish to repeat. Something any sane man or woman would do anything to avoid. And you, I wanted to be with you, to be close to you, and how could I make sense of that in the context of what … what I remembered?"
She ran her fingers gently over his chest, tracing the outline of the muscles there. "Is that why you were sometimes so … distant?"
"No," Cullen said. "No, that was the lyrium."
She raised herself a little to look at him, head propped on her hand. "What's it like? Lyrium?" When he was silent, she went on, "You've talked about the power, the strength. The song."
"Those things, yes," he said. "And — it makes things clearer. Like when you watch a battle from a high vantage point, and you can see the ebb and flow, the movement of troops, in a way you can't when you're in the middle of it." He paused. "And you can make decisions more easily, because of what you can see. And what you can't."
"No blood, no dust, no noise," Killeen said.
"Yes," Cullen said. "Everything becomes a little like that. Clear, and distant."
"Do you still miss it?" she asked softly.
"No." He looked past her, gaze on the ceiling — or the past. "It made certain things easier, yes. And there are times … I know I could do more, be more, than I am. But also — be less. Lyrium gives Templars their powers, makes them more than merely human — until it makes them less than human. It was already changing me. I'm not sure I would have cared about you. And the thought of that sickens me."
"It sounds …" she hesitated. "A little how I feel, when I go into combat. Clear. Cool. But I don't think I'd want to be like that all the time."
Something in her tone made Cullen look at her. "No." He lifted a hand and traced her cheekbone with one finger. "You were always good at that," he said. "Focusing."
"It's more, now." She turned her head, kissed the tips of his fingers. "Or I've needed to do it more, for longer. When I was in the Kirkwall Guard — yes, sometimes it was blades out, shields up, and Maker's balls, we trained to be ready for it when it came. But I can count on one hand the number of times a fight went longer than five minutes once the Guard was in it. And now …"
"And now?"
Killeen sighed. "Now I'm a soldier. I'm … not the same, any more."
"You're the same," Cullen said. "The job's different."
"What we do changes us," she said. "You ought to know that better than anyone."
"I know I am not what I once did," he countered. "Nor what I allowed to be done."
"Would you be who you are now if it had never happened?" Killeen asked, pressed when he hesitated. "Cullen?"
"No," he admitted very softly. "No. I would doubtless still be a Templar … still unquestioning. But you — I could never have managed this last year without you. The Inquisition could never have managed this last year without you. And … everything that you have done, was in you, back in Kirkwall. I saw it then, and I still see it now."
"Perhaps," Killeen said. "I saw in you then what I see now, but … it's clearer now. You have changed. So have I." She paused, then admitted, "A year ago, I would never have chanced Darktown alone. A year ago, I would have been sensible and waited for Aveline and if Thomas had died … I would have hardly known how to live with myself but I would have found a way."
"If this is the way the Inquisition's changed you, I don't think I like it much," Cullen said.
"Cullen, you fell in love with me because I was willing to spend my life to save others," Killeen said.
"I —"
"You said it," Killeen said. "When I ran out to the trebuchets, at Haven, you said."
"No," Cullen said. "That was when I knew that I loved you. Not because you were willing to die on my orders, Kill, but because I thought I was about to lose you and that made everything very clear."
"Oh," she said softly.
"Is that it?" he asked. "You're trying to impress me?"
"No," Killeen said. "It's — it's what I said. It's too much, Cullen, it's too long. Being ready, being cold and clear and not distracted by anything." She paused. "I don't like it, Cullen. I want to love you, all the time, not just most of the time."
"Have you changed your mind about that desk job, then?"
She thumped his shoulder, not gently. "No. And try to resist the urge to use this against me." She paused, and said more seriously. "Really, Cullen. It doesn't encourage …"
"All right," he said.
"I told you I was no soldier when you asked me to come with you and you said —"
"I'll make you one," Cullen said.
"And you did."
On the road, it's not much different to what she knows. There's a group of new recruits waiting for them when they disembark, although for all Killeen notices or cares with her stomach still trying to turn itself inside out, they could each have two heads and three legs.
The next morning, solid ground having restored her, she watches Cullen putting them through a drill. He's curt, impatient: Killeen wonders if this is how it is done, in an army rather than the Guard, or if it is only that it has been a long time since Cullen has had direct command over recruits as inexperienced as these farmers and shopkeepers, weavers and potters.
There's not many more of them than a squad, and Killeen has had enough teenagers cycle through her squad through the years to know she could handle them better than Cullen is — but they are not hers, they are his, and so she stands and watches.
Watches the young and not-so-young men and women who are willing to throw in their lot with the probably-doomed efforts to end the Mage Rebellion, gauging which of them is here for glory, which for adventure … spotting the pale-eyed girl whose fierce intensity betrays that she is here for revenge.
Cullen finally calls a halt to the drill when the recruits are weak-kneed and panting, some vomiting their breakfast. He strides away and Killeen follows him, finds him inspecting their mounts, tight-lipped and set-faced.
"We have barely weeks to create a fighting force," he snaps. "With this as raw material."
Killeen suddenly understands what drives him, why he drives them: for the first time in a decade, Cullen is without the framework of the Templar Order to guide him, and if that were not enough, at stake is his chance to end the catastrophe he believes is, at least partly, his fault. Make me an army, Lady Cassandra had said to him, and if he fails …
"They'll get better," Killeen says easily. She moves a little, so Cullen has to turn or give her his back.
He turns, which puts his face in clear view of the exhausted recruits.
Killeen grins at him. "Although I'd watch your nugs around that short red-head. He's from Redcliffe, you know. Hey, what do you call a man standing in Redcliffe village with a nug under each arm?"
"Killeen!" Cullen says, but he's almost smiling, and when she says a pimp he can't hold back the chuckle.
Walking back to the recruits, Killeen sees one or two of them looking at her with an expression that tells her they just saw what she meant them to see: their stone-faced Commander laughing and joking with their new Lieutenant. The story would be widely retailed by this evening, she'd put all the money she had on it.
"All right, nug-humpers." She stopped in front of them. "On your feet, fall in, you, Blondie, what's your name?"
"Norris, ser!"
"Take one giant step to your left, Norris — your other left, there you go — Carrot, in behind him — that's right — arm's length from the soldier next to you, arm's length from the soldier in front, check, don't guess! You with the squint, don't be afraid to touch the man next to you. Maker knows, some of you will be doing a lot more than patting each other's shoulders after three weeks on the road."
Laughing, blushing, they shuffled themselves into order. Killeen made them fall out, form up again, then again, teasing and scolding, until they could get themselves into roll-call order without her needing to offer corrections.
"Good!" she said. "You have taken the first step on the long road to becoming possibly worth my time and effort! You have one hour to eat, shit, and pack your gear! If you are not back here in one hour with your packs on your backs you had better start running and pray I break my leg before I catch up with you because I will make you wish you were a nug in Redcliffe ! One hour! Go!"
They went.
Killeen turned back to see Cullen watching her, his gaze cool and assessing. "Perhaps you should take charge of their training," he said. "At least at first."
And so she does. Takes charge, too, of her own private project: humanising the Inquisition's new military commander, turning him from a terrifying marionette to a man they'll follow to the edge of the Void, and beyond if called for.
Turning him from the man they see to the man she knows.
She works it from both ends. With the recruits, she drops stories from Kirkwall into conversation over the evening meal — carefully chosen ones, the time he took on a Qunari, two dwarves and a drunk mule, the time he finished a fight with an apostate mage with a well-timed knee to the balls …
With Cullen, later, talking over the days events in his tent, she makes sure to impress on him the little things she's picked up from the recruits: that Hugh the Weaver has joined the Inquisition because his sister is a mage whose life hangs in the balance as long as the war goes on, that pale-eyed Serena had lost a husband and her unborn child when the war between Templars and mages rolled over the hamlet where she lived …
"I'm sorry for your loss," she hears Cullen say to Serena the next day, sees the woman blink in shock and then blink back tears. Hears, too, Cullen ask Hugh his sister's name, her Circle, promise him to seek out news.
He cannot help but offer comfort where he can — it is part of him, deep in the bone, from before, Killeen suspects, Templars and vows. She feels a flick of guilt that she has counted on it, manipulated it — but then, has she lied to him, to them?
All she has done is open a space for him to show them who he is.
Not all that he is. The first night she wakes to hear muttered cries from the tent next to hers, she slips out of her cot as quickly as at an alarm bell and into his. Cullen, wake up, you're dreaming, rouses him before he can rouse the camp. After that she takes night watch, every night, listens for his voice —
She wants the recruits to know he is human — but not too human.
It takes her several weeks on the road to realise that she is learning from him, as well: that he is guiding her into a new way of thinking as subtly and surreptitiously as she is guiding him. They talk late into the night about the strategic situation, about Cullen's plans and hopes, and Killeen finds herself thinking in terms of battalions and regiments rather than squads. Once the recruits have gained fitness and mastered basic commands, Cullen begins to train them again in the evenings — less harshly, Killeen is pleased to see — and she learns to form a shield wall as if there are a hundred men and women on either side of her, not the sharp flying wedge that is the speciality of the Kirkwall Guard. Finds herself following his orders without thinking of civilians or bystanders — finds herself thinking in terms of enemy and ally, a simpler cast of mind than she is used to.
Finds herself, too, as they gather more and more groups of recruits on the way to Haven, dealing with supply sergeants and transport teams as Cullen does — as if they are duty-bound to do as she asks, not as she is used to, in Kirkwall, as a supplicant who must coax their attention for her tiny squad.
When they ride into Haven, she is at his stirrup, straight-backed. Their troops behind them are in tight travelling formation, outriders sweeping in as they reach their destination.
Cullen dismounts, flings his reins to waiting hands, strides up the steps to where Lady Cassandra waits.
Killeen slips to the ground.
"All right, boys and girls! Welcome home! Last squadron to set their tents digs latrines for the whole army!"
Later, when the sky splits open, she will command those very same men and women to fall in, to follow Cullen, to charge into the Void itself.
They will obey, all of them, including Norris, including pale-eyed Serena and Hugh the weaver.
Cullen will speak eloquently at the memorial service. Killeen herself will stand dry-eyed in the ranks as he does so, watching the others to see who will need an extra word of encouragement, a shoulder to cry on.
She will lead the toasts to the fallen in the Singing Maiden without more than touching her lips to the ale in her cup.
Will push the grief she feels down and away, because her responsibility now is to stand between Cullen and the men and women he commands and translate one to the other.
Cullen, in his tent later, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, staring bleakly at the roll of the fallen on his desk: also her responsibility.
She will blink away unshed tears and drop into the camp-stool across from him, setting her feet on his desk. "So, I heard a rumour … the Herald's awake."
"Kill?" Cullen said softly, finger tracing her cheekbone, and she opened her eyes, came back to the present.
"You said you'd make me a solider and you did," she said. "I'm a soldier because that's what you needed me to be and this is the only way I know how to be one, and the more and the longer I am … Cullen, you made me this. Congratulate yourself on your success."
He looked stricken. "Kill …"
"Yes ser," Killeen said. "Who? How many?"
"That's not what I —"
"You don't even hear yourself say it. Varric calls me Killer and everybody laughs. I used to be a Guard, Cullen! I used to be good at being a Guard. Talking to people — talking them out of bad ideas and into good ones, helping people, settling arguments … Now what am I? I'm a weapon turned to your hand, I'm the shield against blows you can't parry and that's all I can do, Cullen, that's all that's left of me!"
"It isn't, Killeen, it isn't, it isn't," he soothed, gathering her to him as she began to weep.
"I left them," she sobbed. "Aveline, everyone. Left them and walked away after all they gave me."
"You gave a great deal back," he said. "You gave all you needed to. When I left Kirkwall, I knew, for all that I owed the Order — which was everything that made me who I was, good and bad — I knew I could give no more to it, nor it to me."
"You left to leave," Killeen said. "I left to go with you."
"I can't be sorry you did," Cullen said. "Is that selfish?"
"I can't be sorry I did either," Killeen said. "But coming back here … I need to find a way to … live with it. With not being sorry. With being changed. With …" She shivered. "Cullen, I saw it again. The dragon. It was like I was there."
Cullen's hand ran, steady and warm, along the length of her spine, and back, and down again. "It's been a while since you had those dreams."
"I was awake," Killeen said. "I was looking up at the stars and then I was looking up at that great black shape blotting out the sky and knowing I was living my very last seconds of life."
His hand didn't pause in its soothing movement. "It happens."
"I know. I know you —" She was silent. "What if it happens when it matters? What if it happens in a fight? Did you ever —"
"No," he said. "I mean — yes. There were times when I couldn't have told you if the mages I was fighting were in the Circle Tower or in the streets. When the demons could have been in Kinloch or Kirkwall. But combat is combat — wherever you are." He paused again. "It will pass. It will grow less, and pass."
"It did for you. After ten years." She closed her eyes. "And you had lyrium to help."
"I don't think it helped," Cullen said. "It seemed to. But when I stopped — when I tried to stop. Everything was … it was as if no time had passed. It wasn't until I did stop, with Cassandra's help, and even then not at first …" He paused. "Cassandra's help, and yours."
"Mine?" Killeen said a little incredulously.
He laughed softly. "Do you really not know how much difference you made to me, for all those months? Maker, Killeen … you made me laugh when I couldn't see anything ahead but darkness and despair. Knowing you'd wake me when I dreamed was the only reason I dared to sleep. Those peaceful moments over tea in the morning were the only peace I knew. And … wanting you was how I learned the difference between what was done to me and what I might choose to do."
"Oh," she said softly.
"I loved you before then, and I would have loved you still had you done none of it," Cullen said. "But by Andraste, Killeen, you held me together body and soul when I had no way to do so myself." He touched her face gently, ran his thumb over her lips. "And I will do the same for you. Even if it takes ten years. Until you stop dreaming, and stop seeing, and stop throwing yourself into fights you know you can't win."
She turned her face against his shoulder. "I don't know how."
"We'll figure it out," Cullen said. He put his fingers under her chin, raised her face and kissed her. "Together."
Note: Posting may be slower for a little. I am trying to work out a problem with plotting created by trying to include several different suggestions from readers, and I have a nasty flu, which is leading to much staring at the page and failing to find creative solutions ...
