Backthreading, nsfw

[questionablewit]

[[Backthreading nsfw romantic history post for 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?"

Comments

[birdhousesoul]

Other things to do. He knows the story. He does not say a word about Carver. He spares her, too, condolences on the Blight sickness that took her father. It's not the time to speak of death, Karl's or her father's or anyone's, except as a passing fact, the milestone that marks a shift, the stone in the river that diverts its course. He holds her closer as she notes these moments, though, for comfort, and wishes he could have done when these were happening. Someone should have been there. She shouldn't have been the one to shoulder the responsibility of a whole family, that young.

If she hadn't, though, she wouldn't be his Hawke today, and that's unthinkable. "Thus you progressed onward, to greater heights," he suggests, "beyond the home fields and into the wide world, where I'm certain you made many acquaintances and broke many hearts. Not your fault, of course, the heartbreaking, just an inevitable consequence of being this beautiful and there only being one of you, not nearly enough to go around."

[questionablewit]

That brings a smile back, and she twists her head to kiss his chin. "Nothing so poetic, I'm afraid. That brings us to the army, which involves a lot more mud than all the pretty songs and stories would have you believe. It was everywhere, constantly, and between that and training in the various weapons they gave us and the fact that we were marching across Ferelden, even the most sex-crazed would be too exhausted by the end of the day to find the idea of more physical action appealing, no matter what it involved. With a few notable exceptions who were made of hardier stuff, one of whom just happened to be a junior officer named Lara."

Her arm is beginning to go to sleep, so she twists until she's on her back, still loosely in his embrace but able to shake out the numbed limb. "She was a specialist, trained in sabotage, and she took me under her wing when I showed an interest and proved to have a knack for it. Most cool-headed person I've ever known. If there was an ogre headed towards her I don't think she'd have flinched, just assessed her options and picked the best one. I admired that a lot." And tried to emulate it, with a certain amount of success. Hawke had learned a great deal from Lara, both consciously and unconsciously. "She's the one who taught me how to recognize and disable traps, pick locks, all of that. There wasn't as much call for those skills against darkspawn raids, they tend to be pretty straightforward. A lot of rar, me tear out your liver with my teeth, as I'm sure you know. So she enjoyed having a student and setting me tests and tricks to work out, to relieve the boredom."

Her mouth quirks. "And in that case, it was definitely Lara who had all the experience, in every sense. I never knew where I stood with her, one minute I'd feel like a proud saboteur-in-training and the next I'd be an awkward village girl from the middle of nowhere who knew nothing and was painfully aware of the fact. The first time she kissed me, I nearly panicked, wondering if it was another test and what I was supposed to do."