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[[Backthreading nsfw romantic history post for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
birdhousesoul. Set not long after they hook up, before All That Remains]]
Hawke falls back on the bed, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead, skin flushed. It's the middle of the night, but the fire in the fireplace still burns enough to cast more light than shadows on her skin, and on the skin of the man next to her. "That was amazing." Still breathing hard, she smiles brilliantly at him, then decides that's not enough and rolls towards him for another kiss. She can't seem to stop kissing him now that she's finally able to. Not that she's tried hard to resist the urge for the past...week, maybe two weeks? It seems longer, and not long enough. "Andraste's flaming pyre, Anders, where'd you learn to do all this?"
birdhousesoul. Set not long after they hook up, before All That Remains]]Hawke falls back on the bed, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead, skin flushed. It's the middle of the night, but the fire in the fireplace still burns enough to cast more light than shadows on her skin, and on the skin of the man next to her. "That was amazing." Still breathing hard, she smiles brilliantly at him, then decides that's not enough and rolls towards him for another kiss. She can't seem to stop kissing him now that she's finally able to. Not that she's tried hard to resist the urge for the past...week, maybe two weeks? It seems longer, and not long enough. "Andraste's flaming pyre, Anders, where'd you learn to do all this?"
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Date: 2011-12-27 10:11 pm (UTC)From:He gives a good-natured groan. "Everyone knows where I learned to do all this. Isabela's already told you more than I ever knew she knew about my sordid history, I'd wager." Rolling onto his side to face Hawke, he yields to a less colorful temptation, allowing himself to tuck a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. How many times in the past three years has he longed to do that, something so simple? "I ought to ask the same question of you. You're far too good at, mm, a few things I could list, but I'm too much a gentleman to name them all. And I know you turned down Jethann, so I can't credit him for it."
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Date: 2011-12-27 10:24 pm (UTC)From:"As for me, reading all over Varric's books, of course. He's a dwarf who does his research, those things are detailed. And you'd lose that wager; Isabela suspects a great deal and is all too pleased to come up with wild theories but candidly admitted she knew very little for certain." A few weeks ago, Hawke would not have been willing to admit pressing Isabela for information on the subject of Anders' previous sexual exploits. Now it's just something else they can laugh about. Hawke laughs a lot these days.
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Date: 2011-12-27 10:35 pm (UTC)From:You get all the love for mentioning the duck. Seriously. *is too fond of that duck*
Date: 2011-12-27 10:58 pm (UTC)From:"Anyway, you know what I've been doing for the past year, you were there for most of it. Running around being Kirkwall's unofficial pest control service, spending a surprising amount of time dealing with the Qunari, and trying to convince you to give this a try." She moves her hips against his as she says this, a suggestion of a recent memory. Though it wasn't sex she'd been asking him for all that time, or at least not just sex, as he knows very well. "No time in there for intensive training. Though I'll grant you the not a blushing ingenue part. I didn't get started quite as young as you did in the Circle--fifteen, did you say?--but it was certainly a while ago."
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Date: 2011-12-28 06:45 pm (UTC)From:"The only time he ever said a word, I'd gotten involved with this apprentice transferred in from Orlais, she'd been a troublemaker where she was, fairly strong Resolutionist sympathies. Karl and I didn't see eye to eye, politically, and I thought that was the problem, or else that he didn't like my being with a woman, someone he couldn't match or best." They had a tacit understanding: No matter how many lovers I take, you're the one I want most, better than anyone else. Not love. Preferential treatment. "That was the one time he had to speak up. As pretty as you are, he said, you ought to know it isn't you she wants. I thought that was comical, really, coming from Karl; he had less interest in the Circle's romantic intrigues than anyone else I knew." Which was part of why Anders had to be the one to play the field, to confuse the trail.
Anders clears his throat. "This is something I did tell Bethany. Resolutionists, you know, want mages to be free of the Circle completely. They're the main faction supporting the mage underground. And one of the principles they have is, the more mages there are, the harder it will be to ignore their plight or suppress them. The more mage children are born, the more power we'll have to fight for what should be ours. I can't say Karl was right in what he thought or feared, but he could have been. In essence, he decided what she wanted was to ... carry my talents over to the next generation. Posterity, and all that, in a literal sense. It's ridiculous this should ever have come up, but it's the one time he ever asked me to stop seeing someone else. I did cool things off a bit with her, to keep him from worrying too much — he was a world-class champion at worrying. But I got to know other Resolutionists through her, and I wasn't in the Tower for much longer after that. Not as a permanent resident. Being in the cells doesn't count."
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Date: 2011-12-28 07:19 pm (UTC)From:She forces herself to let go of the idea. From the way he's phrased things it didn't happen, might not even have been more than a suspicion on Karl'es part. And Maker's name, they've only been together a few days. She has no right to be possessive in this respect, particularly not of things that happened long ago, before they ever met. That's getting off-track and then some.
The political aspects of the idea don't surprise her. She's heard a bit about Circle factions here and there, more than a non-mage would usually manage to learn, and there's a logic to the idea of solving the mage problem by making a lot more mages. The sheer cold-bloodedness of it is still a bit sickening to her, however.
Hawke calms her breathing and settles back down next to him, looking for something else to concentrate her attention on, though what else there was in this bit of the story isn't terribly encouraging either. And it's not as though she can ask him to get back to Karl, skip to the end; she knows the end, how devastatinly painful it was, how wasted. That's why she wanted to know the beginning as well. "In the cells, huh. I take it that's a result of one of the infamous escape attempts rather than something more risqué." Dark humor to approach still dangerous subjects, but things she also very much wants to know, has wanted to know and been unable to ask for years. "I take it Karl disapproved of those, if you had different political leanings."
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Date: 2011-12-28 07:40 pm (UTC)From:Anders kisses Hawke's forehead, again. The same place where the Tranquil brand would go, he thinks, despite himself, and shudders. Part of the justification for allowing himself to be with her, to love her, to let her love him: she's not a mage, she will never be subjected to that.
"When they put me in solitary confinement, that was the end for Karl and I. It saved us from all kinds of unpleasant discussions we'd otherwise have needed to inflict on one another, I suspect. I hated being alone, thought it was the cruellest sentence they could have imposed, and Karl thought they were doing me a favor, going lightly on me. They don't want to make an example of you, you idiot. They just want you to stop giving people stupid ideas. That's what he claimed to believe, anyhow, the one chance we did get to talk before they locked me up for a year. It wasn't as bad as you might think, hardly the stuff of martyrdom — there was Mr. Wiggums the cat on that floor, and I wasn't being starved, and I had books, and I knew half the guards already so there were chats every now and then, sometimes shouting matches if it was a guard I didn't like. But it was like torture to me, all the same. If it took becoming a Grey Warden to keep from ever going through that again, by the Maker a Grey Warden was what I'd be. I didn't plan on becoming a Grey Warden, of course. But I don't regret it. Or the same, for Bethany," he tells Hawke firmly. He knows there's hard feelings there, will always wonder whether Bethany blames him for the hardships of her new life, too.
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Date: 2011-12-28 08:01 pm (UTC)From:She can't find anything to say in response to that, to any of this. All she can do is kiss him. Which she does, deep and emotional, as her arms wrap around him with a silent promise: Never again. I will never let anyone cage you again. Even if it means taking on the Knight-Commander and every Templar she has.
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Date: 2011-12-29 07:51 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-12-29 10:47 pm (UTC)From:She turns her head to grin ruefully. "It was certainly a rush at the time, but I doubt we made a pretty picture, so I'm afraid your suspicions fall down there. Do you know, she and I never even spoke about it? Not much, at least. It wasn't really about either of us. It was about knowing how to stay alive, in more than one sense."
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Date: 2011-12-30 07:40 am (UTC)From:Sigrun might not find all the blood excessively offputting, though. She was always very practical.
Why is he thinking about Sigrun, again? And why is he imagining Velanna trying to convince her that trees are sexy? Crazy Dalish woman. Velanna would be into trees.
Focus, Anders. "Well, anyhow, her lessons must have stood you in good stead, where all the lockpicking and rogue things are concerned. You're brilliant at it." Compliment the lady! Do not breathe a word about dwarf-on-elf-on-tree action!
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Date: 2011-12-31 11:01 am (UTC)From:"But yes, those lessons--the lockpicking and rogue ones, not the ones that involved trees--were the basis for a lot of what I do now. It was a solid grounding in the basics. After that it was mostly a matter of practice and opportunity, and Maker knows I get chances for that here." He gets a quick kiss for the compliment. Too bad she doesn't know what he's really thinking, jokes about wood and unfortunately placed bark would abound. It would unhinge the conversation though, which would probably be a pity.
Though the conversation now goes problematic places, because what had ended her 'relationship' with Lara was Ostagar. Not something Hawke intends to make pillow talk about, to say the least.
He'll fill in the gaps. She sighs and stretches her arms in the air above her chest. "Anyway, after that I came to Kirkwall, and had a charming year of indentured servitude working for smugglers, as you know. It could have been worse, at least most of them had senses of humor." She's pretty sure the mercenaries who were her other option had none. "There was a bit more experience in there, but nothing really noteworthy, to be honest. Casual friends passing time."
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Date: 2012-01-01 06:26 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-01-02 12:54 pm (UTC)From:"A fighter capable of impressive damage, but also a healer. Compassionate, but at times implacable. Intelligent, able to find humor in some of the most unlikely places, but with a gravity about him when the humor wasn't in play. Passionate, as I said, but controlling it, directing it." She runs a finger along his mouth. "Entirely irresistable and unforgettable. I'm afraid I can't explain how or why he withstood me for so long, it's a mystery. Isabela tried to distract me but it was too late, I was riveted. So she switched to torturing me now and then with explicit descriptions of the things I could do to him that might wear away at his determination to not give in to my wiles. I dwelt on them at length. Especially here." She moves against him, just a bit. "The number of times I considered pushing him up against a wall and seeing what would happen, the number of nights I lay awake at night imagining the possibilities, in vivid detail..."
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Date: 2012-01-03 09:10 am (UTC)From:They've been sleeping together less than a fortnight and already Anders wonders whether Hawke plans to repay him in kind for the preceding years of frustration. He could swear she delights in teasing him to the point he can't do anything but pounce. Perhaps that first kiss set a pattern — or a bad example — or a good example — whatever the case, her games haven't palled, and he enjoys playing along.
"What an absolute trial it must have been. You, lying awake, saddled with such an active imagination. All alone, left to your own devices. Your own ... inventive ... devices." She's not making this easy on him. "I can pity your poor chimera, who probably spent most of those nights suffering the effects of your wiles. I met a woman like you once, a few years back, and she was an unholy terror. I lived in mortal fear of her, I swear it. Never knew when she might materialize from the shadows to demand aid with some dodgy mission or other, perhaps to help find someone's lost hat or to recover some illegal shipment that a thief stole from a smuggler. You'd think I might have learned to tell her no, and perhaps I might have, too, except for one thing. She always walked at the head of the party. And that meant I got to walk behind her. Wherever we went, the view was always stunning."
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Date: 2012-01-03 01:26 pm (UTC)From:Whenever he strains for her, she dodges away, then darts back to tease him further. Small movements, but those are all that's required. Half of being a rogue is not being where the attack is, and then attacking where one isn't expected or can't be retaliated. It's a philosophy that applies to more than combat, and Hawke's always been good at adapting her tactics to new situations. Her finger's left his mouth--with some reluctance--and is trailing down his jawline.
"An unholy terror, hmm? Tell me about her. Surely there was more to it than a pretty backside view. Even the most shapely of hips can't have been worth that sort of constant aggravation." He'd better be referring to her and not the Warden-Commander.
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Date: 2012-01-08 05:44 pm (UTC)From:It's convenient to have her lying atop him this way. He has so much scope for movement. His other hand makes an unhurried pass up her side, brushing the curve of her breast there before glancing off and over to her shoulder, the side of her throat, the line of her jaw, the kiss-stung swell of her lower lip.
"You know how dreams are," Anders confides. "Anything you've seen or felt or read in waking life is fair game, can come swimming up to haunt you. This woman I've been telling you about ... I worked with her very closely. Saw her every week, sometimes every day, for years, in a variety of circumstances and outfits and moods. And as we've discussed, I am no blushing ingenue. Awake, I knew I couldn't touch her. Asleep, all that reasoned certainty was gone. Everything I'd ever done with a woman, every moment that had ever snagged and caught in my memory, those belonged to her in my dreams, and she belonged to me. Her hands, her mouth, her arse, her breasts pressed together ..."
His fingers have been tracing lazy patterns at the verge of her inner thigh, but now without warning they wander in and up, the lightest ghost of a touch tracing the cleft there, not even granting enough pressure to part. "What I wanted most ..." If her breathing is labored, his is held a moment when he touches her there. He's teasing himself as much as he's teasing her. "Every way I'd ever taken a woman, I took her, in those blighted dreams. However maddening she was in life, in dreams she was most sweetly yielding, would do anything, would ask for more. I'd wake up throbbing or a mess."
He holds her face, cups her cheek, refuses to let himself take the kiss he wants, not just yet. "And that," he whispers, "was before I'd actually seen all of her. Imagine the torture after."
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Date: 2012-01-08 07:19 pm (UTC)From:There's another brush of fingers, or perhaps it's a trick of her fancy; either way, her eyelids flutter closed for a moment as she forces back another whimper. "Everything, from laughter-filled lovemaking to frenzied, possessive fucking. I thought about all of it. Craved all of it. I spent as many days with him as you did with your dream-woman, I knew his moods, and I applied them. Some nights I'd think of him touching me gently, paying slow, careful attention to every inch of my body." Andraste's ass this is excruciating, but so sweet at the same time... "Some nights I'd pay him back for every frustrating day of waiting, until he'd plead for mercy, which I might or might not grant."
Her arms are holding her up somewhat, which limits her range of movement, but she manages to tangle her hands in his hair. Lightly, still, not gripping the scalp, just letting the strands excite her skin. "But mostly...I mentioned he was passionate, didn't I? Mostly I'd imagine all that controlled passion unleashed and directed at me. He was experienced, far more so than I am, and the combination of skill and fervor was devastating." Her voice can barely be heard, but the intensity in it is unmissable. "He could make me beg."
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Date: 2012-01-08 09:16 pm (UTC)From:"Ah, but there's a difference. I was dreaming, you were awake. You could control your fantasies. Even when you imagined him directing it all ..." Now he does part her, against his better judgement, because he wants to feel her, wants her to know he's sure of the effect he's having on her. His fingers slide along slick folds, declining to seek entry. "... really, you held the reins, didn't you? In those scenarios you envisioned, he'd do anything you wanted. However improbable. Though what could be so improbable? Who wouldn't do anything for you?"
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Date: 2012-01-11 12:24 pm (UTC)From:She'd failed her family twice over; three times, if you included Bethany, which she did. Bethany was still alive, yes, but that was no thanks to Hawke, only to Anders. And she was lost to them, and unhappy in her new life as well. Not exactly a win. It makes Hawke more determined than ever to protect not just her mother, but her mother's happiness, what of it is left with her husband and two children gone.
But Leandra's in no danger. They've recovered the estate, the Amell name, the Amell fortune, even. Aside from grief for the twins, they're doing well. Hawke has space and time, for the first time in years, to have something for herself. Just for herself, not because it benefits anyone else, but because she wants it. Though to say that she wants this relationship is seriously understating the case, because her life has somehow rearranged itself around being in love with Anders. She didn't do it on purpose, and she wouldn't know how to undo it if she wished, but she doesn't wish it. It was unsettling, at first. In a way she's being as selfish as Anders is, being with him, allowing a distraction to her own cause. It's not one as politically or sociologically significant as his, no, but it's as sacred a trust, at least to her.
That's why she's done all she can for her mother, everything possible. And despite Carver and Bethany, Leandra is happy nowadays, keeping an eye on the family she still has (even the impossible Gamlen), mingling with society, reclaiming the heritage she left years ago. Moreover, Leandra likes Anders, is pleased that Hawke is happy. She's made that clear.
It gives Hawke a freedom she hadn't realized she was lacking, hadn't known she needed or could have. The same freedom she feels whenever she's with Anders, the chance to be completely herself, parts set aside long ago as irrelevent now regained, rejoined, made whole.
"I don't think I mind, coming from you," Hawke finally says. "Though it's strange to hear. Might take some getting used to." She smiles. "I'm not sure it fits me as well as that rosey outfit does, given how much I've grown over the past several years. It may require some tailoring."
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Date: 2012-01-12 09:36 pm (UTC)From:"It's only ... things are different now," he tries to reify it by putting it into words, and finds that words won't do the job they're needed for. "You're Hawke, to me, always. It's how I first knew you, how I'll always know you. But now you're something else as well, and I come home to you at night, and your mother's here and telling me about you, Marian's in the study, Marian's gone out, or ... this is a secret, mind, but she may have volunteered a tale or two about your adorable toddler years."
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Date: 2012-01-13 07:27 pm (UTC)From:"That's my goat story, and I am owed a Ser Quackers adventure in return. What about it, hm?"
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Date: 2012-01-13 10:37 pm (UTC)From:She's not pressing him for more stories of his youth--she'd like to, she'd like to know everything, even the painful things, but she knows he'd refuse and only be unhappy about the request, so she doesn't--merely teasing, and to make that clearer, continues. "I think I'm owed something in return. A backrub, perhaps? To be redeemed at a time of my choosing?"
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Date: 2012-01-13 11:29 pm (UTC)From:"I reserve the right to choose the oil we use, and to suggest an alternate location should you demand one unsuitable for optimal backrub delivery."
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