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i.
The first time they speak, really speak, she is lost.
Not physically - she is a Dalish, and a Dalish always knows where to place their next step. But her mind is without direction, and as she stands outside the grand gates of Haven she questions what would happen if she were to simply...flee. To follow the path that her feet take her, to leave the Inquisition and the rift and the shemlens in her wake. How long before it caught up to her? she wonders, and decides it all depends on how quickly she was able to run.
She always was the fastest in her clan.
“How are you?” A voice asks - rich, honeyed - she hadn’t even heard him approach. Quiet, for a shemlen, especially considering his size. “The Inquisition must be quite a change, from what you are used to.”
He smiles. She does not trust him.
“Quite.” Sharp eyes snap over in his direction; he is tall, stands proud, every bit the Commander that his title suggests. She does not - will not - trust him. “And you as well. You are a Templar, are you not?”
“Was,” he corrects, and she nearly rolls her eyes. A wolf does not stop being a wolf if you take away his fur. “I left the Order after the rebellion in Kirkwall. They were...no longer the people I had idolized in my youth, no longer upheld the ideals that were once at their core. It began to take it’s toll.”
“But you still think the Order should be restored.” It is not a question - she sees the way his eyes linger on her staff, the way his hand flexes over his sword when she makes too sudden a move.
He does not trust her.
“Good fences make good neighbours,” is his eventual reply, and, despite her baser instincts, Lavellan thinks it to be a good one.
ii.
She returns from Redcliffe, and she is broken and bloody and bruised - not on the outside but on the in.
Cullen is waiting for them when they arrives - he does not speak as he helps her off her horse, and she thanks the Creators for small favours. If he notices the way her hands shake when she touches his sleeve (real, alive, you have not failed them yet) he pretends as if he doesn’t, and she thanks Mythal for larger ones.
It is only when they reach the Chantry doors that he turns to her, scanning her face with an intensity she is familiar with, has seen far too many times before - but what does he search for? Whatever it is, she hopes he does not find it, for her sake more than his.
“You chose to conscript the rebel mages rather than offer them a full alliance,” he states at last, and ah, she does not know why she expected anything but. They have build a tentative camaraderie, the two of them, one in which he does not question the ethics of her magic and she does not question the ethics of his former job as a prison guard to her people, and it has worked for them. She hopes he does not tear it down now. “Why?”
Because they killed them. Killed you. Because we had lost. Because I was weak.
Because I was scared it would happen again.
Her pause is a heartbeat too long, she knows, and so she says the first thing that comes to her mind. “Good fences make good neighbours,” is her reply, and if her heart flutters at the upward curl of his lips, she blames it on a lack of sleep.
iii.
The first time she kisses him, Haven is burning.
They maintain a professional distance - before, that is; dancing in circles around each other like some form of an intricate spar, ever the soldiers, the two of them stay far apart. It is better, Lavellan tells herself. Better that she does not get too close, does not accustom herself to the blush that paints his cheeks when she asks him about his vows, better that he does not grow too fond of the way she speaks his name like velvet - “Commander,” she says, and it falls from her tongue like a caress. She does not mean it, she tells herself. Neither of them do.There is a line, they are both painfully aware, and they must not cross it.
Haven is burning, and she does not want to leave him. This is why.
She is strong enough to know that she will not survive this; he is wise enough to know he must convince her to try. And she wants to - Creators, does she want to - but instead she brushes her lips across his cheek, does not blink at the prick of his stubble. It will leave a mark. She does not mind.
“Ir abelas.” she whispers, and takes peace in the fact that he will not know what it means.
He knows what she means, however, has seen enough soldiers to their deaths to recognize sacrifice when it stares him in the face. She will die, alone in the rubble and the snow and the cold, and he will carry on without her - they all will, even if they no longer can remember just what that entails. It is not a surprise to either of them; she thinks she must have seen this coming all along.
iv.
(She does not die, of course. She never was very good at doing what was expected).
v.
“Are you afraid?”
They have been at Skyhold for two months now - it is safe, and they are alive, and there is a disquiet that follows her soul. She sees it in him, too, the way his shoulders sink when he thinks that nobody can see him (but she does. She always does).
“Of what, Inquisitor?” he asks, although she thinks that the question is more avoidance than ignorance. She does not blame him - it is not a kind thing for her to ask.
“Losing,” is her answer, but from the lack of surprise on his face it is clear he knew it would be all along.
He does not reply right away. Good - if he had, she would have known he was lying. So she watches him as he ponders his response, watches the steady rise and fall of his broad chest, watches the way the light that filters through the windows of his office catches in his hair, creating a halo of gold, a miniature sun which draws her in like a beacon. It is a beautiful sight, and she thinks that, were he truly a sun and she nothing but a planet, she would gladly spend her days circling his orbit (and is what they are doing now so dissimilar? She thinks not).
“What did you say to me, before you left the Chantry in Haven?”
He had expected her question; she had not expected his.
“Ir abelas.” He deserves honesty, it is clear she owes him that much, and so she takes a step forward, places her left hand over his right, squeezes so tightly it is if she is trying to fuse them into one. A pause, and he reciprocates in kind - his hands are tough but gentle, and she wonders not for the first time how they would feel on the rest of her body, in the hollow of her back, on her breasts, tugging through her coarse hair until she begged for more. “I am sorry.”
Cullen looks at her then, really looks at her, looks at her as if she were the stars and the moon and as if her eyes were the keepers to all the secrets of the Heavens, the ones which he will never be able to understand but will pray for an answer to anyways; his eyes reflect a multitude of emotions which she cannot name, and she wonders if any of them are ones that have never been felt until this moment, ones that belong uniquely to the two of them, their hands intertwined, searching for a truth they cannot see.
“Yes,” he says at last, and his voice is filled with the sorrow of words yet unspoken. “I am afraid.”
They end their dance, then, and start anew.
vi.
The second time they kiss, it is raining.
There is no Archdemon in the sky, no ancient Darkspawn come to tear their castle to the ground. The threat is still out there, of course - a fact of which the two are acutely aware - but...what is the thing the shemlen say? “Out of sight, out of mind,” and the only thing in her sight is Cullen, and she the only thing in his.
She wonders, as his lips trail a path down her neck, across each line of her vallaslin as if he wishes to tattoo her face with each insistent press, where she would be without him at her side. Would she have made it back to the camp, made it through the snow from the wreckage at Haven, if she could not still feel the scrape of his stubble fresh against her cheek? And he, drowning in lyrium, lost and afraid, without her to pull him from the abyss?
She does not know. She does not care, not when he does that thing with his tongue that wipes every logical thought from her mind.
“I think I like you far too much,” she admits breathily, nothing short of impressed by her own coherence. “Far, far too much. You are a dangerous man to have around, Commander.”
“Me? You are mistaken, Inquisitor.” His voice his hot in her ear, and unfairly steady, although the tight grip of his hand on her waist let her know that he is just as affected as she. “It is you that is the dangerous one. I am nothing but a poor bastard who has fallen unwittingly in your trap.”
She laughs at that, as much as a laugh as she can manage when his kisses are burning across her cheek, and pulls him closer to her, as close as he can physically get without sending the two of them tumbling off of the ramparts.
“And I yours.” Another kiss, full of need, and wonder, and something else she cannot yet identify that she pushed to the back of her mind for the time being; another kiss, and she wonders if she were to fall backwards, over the edge of the stone pressed against her spine, if he would be able to catch her in time. She thinks that she would, and oh -
Creators forgive her, she trusts him.
vii.
She has never know the cruel sting of jealousy until Halamshiral.
It is pathetic. It is weak, and she hates it, hates the feeling with every fiber of her being. Hates the way it eats at her until it consumes her thoughts - there are more important things to focus on, things including the impending assassination of the Empress of Orlais, to name one, and yet there she is, questioning what Orlesian rules of social decorum have to say about freezing a multitude of guests at a ball for making eyes at your lover -
(And then she finds herself questioning if she really cares, pleased when the answer is an unwavering no. It is a reassurance, to see that being the Inquisitor has not changed her completely).
“Who are all these people?” Acid seeps through her teeth but the vultures continue to circle around him, the singular reassurance she receives stemming from the fact that he appears to be just as disturbed as she.
“I don’t know, but they will not leave me alone.” There is no attempt to make his discomfort unknown, or his voice quiet - it backfires, of course, and only seems to draw them in closer. For this, at least, she cannot blame them.
“Not enjoying the attention, I take it?”
“Maker, not at all. Besides, yours is -” He stops then, arches his back down towards her, so that his breath is warming her cheeks and the wisps of her hair that have escaped from beyond her mask are skimming against his, lowers his voice so that it does the thing, the one that makes her knees buckle and her hands shake, and she curses him and praises him at once. “Yours is the only attention worth having.”
For the rest of the night she is entirely distracted, albeit for a completely different reason. She blames it on him.
viii.
She loves the way he says her name.
When he hisses it from between his teeth as he takes her, hard and fast and frantic and unforgiving, when her fingers carve a path down the rugged terrain of his back - mine, mine, mine, she marks him like the wild beasts the shemlen think her people to be.
When he whispers it as he moves within her, soft and slow and gentle - this is not fucking, this is something else entirely, and it’s terrifying and raw and real and as she takes in a desperate breath she thinks that perhaps it is not such a bad thing, this closeness, the way she craves his touch, his presence, craves him at all hours of the day; good fences make good neighbours, they say, but good is something which she has never claimed to be.
When he speaks it in front of other members of the Inquisition, warm and gentle and familiar, it sends a shiver down her spine when she thinks of how he had been moaning it just hours before - they tease them, their friends, tease them for it relentlessly, but there is love in that too, and it radiates off of all of them like a flame.
She love the way he touches her, touches her with a reverence she is not sure she deserves. She loves the way he touches her and breathes her name like a prayer - he worships at her altar like he worships Andraste, and she has never believed in the Maker before, but she thinks that if he were put on this earth by his shemlen god, she may be willing to shift her views.
She loves the way he -
She loves -
She loves him.
For a moment, she forgets how to breathe.
ix.
The last time they kiss, she is crying.
“You will come back to me,” he tells her, but his voice is not as firm as his words - he knows, they both know, they all know, that if her body is returned to him she will not be inside it. “You will come back to me,” he repeats, and she hopes that he will find someone who will make him happy, someone who will give him children and a home and will always place him first, first above all, second behind none, in the way that he deserves, someone who will give him what she cannot.
“I will come back to you,” she tells him, and the sentiment sounds hollow to her own ears.
She wonders who will piece him together, when she is gone and the fragile threads that hold his broken bones together finally snap. She wonders who will gather up the pieces, who will use their body as a cast and fuse his jagged edges together in the way that she never could. She wonders who will hold him when the nightmares hit, who will wipe the sweat from his brow and close his wounds with soothing words; she wonders who will love him enough to make those soothing words ring true, love him to the point where they feel as though they might break too.
She pictures it in her mind, and it hurts her more than she had thought it could. She supposes she must love him more than she thought she could, too.
“Ar lasa mala revas, ma sa’lath,” she whispers, and takes peace in the fact that he will not know what it means.
The world outside his arms is heavy, cold. She should have stayed away, should have never known the warmth that he could bring - good fences make good neighbours, and she had not even tried.
She leaves him then, as she had always known she would.
x.
The Last Time They Kiss is not, in fact, the last time they kiss..
(And why had she expected anything less - why had they both? She does not die, of course. She never had been very good at doing what was expected).