questionablewit | Backthreading, nsfw

Entry tags:

Backthreading, nsfw

[[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?"

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"Not just yet, I think." Anders kisses her, slowly and with profound attention to detail, his tongue exploring her mouth as his fingers explore her depths. "We've got all the time in the world, love."

"Promise?" It's hard not to be impatient, after all this verbal and physical teasing, but she relents. Anders' kisses are too good to resist. "You doing everything to me, repeatedly, is going to take a while. Especially when we start combining our lists of fantasies. I should ask you for a list of every way you've ever taken a woman, in detail." She nips at his mouth, first the upper lip, then the lower. "I may never have a chance to sleep at night again, at this rate. Wonderful thought."

"As your healer, I advise against missing too much sleep. As your lover, I should point out you'll need all your stamina to keep up with a Grey Warden. Sleep is restorative. No, you'll have to take time off. We'll draw all the curtains, spend the days indoors."

He hasn't got the heart to resume his work for mage freedom, not after what he almost did to Ella. He's gone back to the clinic every day, done what he can for those in need of healing, but to his apostate contacts he is emphatically not at home, and it's getting difficult to come up with reasons why. Funny, that: he used to flee to the clinic to escape Hawke; now he flees to Hawke to escape the clinic.

He can't feel remorse for this. He's not neglecting the cause, he's doing it a favor. He's a monster, he can't be trusted, he nearly killed an innocent girl and only Hawke stood between Justice and murder. He's safest with Hawke. Everyone is safest.

And he's wanted her for three years, wanted this. Went into the Deep Roads for her, something he'd thought he would never do again. Perhaps he'll never deserve her, but he deserves something. For himself, for the both of them.

"If people start paying business calls to try and get you out, we'll just have to go to ground somewhere else, won't we? Kirkwall can wait." He withdraws his fingers, awaits protest, arches and shifts to guide her onto him.

"Everything else can wait."

"Yes." It's not agreement, that word, or a statement of approval for his finally joining with her, or not only those things. It's what she is at this moment, a scintillating collection of yes. Yes, this, here, yes.

She moves down onto him, forcing herself to go slow, to savor every delicious sensation. Hawke's beginning to lose count of how many times they've done this over the past almost-two-weeks, but it's still new, still a wonder to her. She didn't know she was capable of so much joy, didn't know it existed in the world. "Yes." She captures his mouth for another kiss when she's taken him in fully, holding him there, holding this moment. This, here, yes.

Were it not for the inconvenient demands of flesh and quotidian life, they'd no doubt have happily stayed in this bed for days, just like this, intertwined and interlocked in a communion more complete than anything Anders has ever known. For all his experience, he's never had anything like what Hawke brings him. He's never been in love before her.

Nor has he ever had the luxury of spending this much time with someone intimately, even taking necessary and mundane interruptions into account. To spend the entire night with the same person every night, both of them free to devote their full attention to one another, no listening for the door, no furtive arrangements, no care to arrive separately or depart at staggered times, no keeping watch while the other rests, no Templars, Maker, no darkspawn.

And it's odd to think, after Anders' lifelong disregard for money, that it's Hawke's growing fortune making all this possible, really. The clinic's a dangerous place — that's why he's moved in with Hawke in the first place, though the arrangement is mostly nominal at present, almost all Anders' effects still in Darktown as he can't be bothered packing or moving anything, having better things to do. The idea of them trysting in Gamlen's house is laughable. No, it's this blighted big Hightown house that creates a safe harbor for their love, as strange as it feels to Anders that he lives in a place like this, can call the Amell estate home. He knows full well that Hawke doesn't care about the house, that it's all for Leandra's sake she's bothered to acquire it, and Anders loves Leandra, wants Leandra's happiness and comfort as much as he'd would for his own mother, maybe more. Still, it's strange.

Strange, too, to be in the dining room with portraits gazing austerely down upon them, patrician lineaments of Amells and interrelated families, what portraits the prior residents didn't sell or ruin after Gamlen's loss of the estate. Anders is learning table manners. No one expects it of him, and he's never been uncivilized, but he's never had this much silver to contend with, either, all the forks alone ... It's not for Hawke he does it, even, though there's that too, the surety that someday she'll be a name to be reckoned with, already on the Viscount's short list of problemsolvers and rising higher in the city's collective esteem, and if he's going to be with her, he's blighted well going to be something other than an embarrassment. It's for Leandra, whom he wants to please. Whose son he would have liked to be, as he reflected with Bethany years ago.

Strange to walk these halls and have Bodahn ask to run errands for him, Bodahn whom he knew in the Deep Roads. As Hawke has pointed out, no one asked Bodahn to be a manservant. Anders has decided, privately, that the dwarf must be undertaking some kind of cryptic penance or service for reasons indecipherable to humankind, and that allowing Bodahn to do chores must serve that end, otherwise he can't countenance the situation.

Strange to have hot baths drawn for him, not a stream or a rusty tin tub scarcely big enough to crouch in. Baths with a beautiful woman and a wooden duck.

All of it is strange. Some of it will never be comfortable, and some of it is already so comfortable that Anders feels guilty, thinking of the refugees in Darktown, or of his fellow mages in the Gallows. But the best of it is here, in this bed, atop him, surrounding him. And for this, he'll do anything.

Her kisses are hundreds of times better than he'd dreamed, because the dreams were echoed fragments and composites of other people, people he didn't love, and he loves Hawke with a fierceness he once would've denied himself capable of possessing.

So he has to stop her kissing him, so he can tell her all over again. "Love you," and he'll hold still if it's what she wants, though he aches to grab her hips and rock together. "So much."

"I love you." Hawke removes her hands from where they're tangled in his hair so she can place her palms flat on the mattress on either side of his head for leverage. Still slowly, she moves until he's just barely inside her, then thrusts down again, resheathing him. And again, and again, gradually picking up speed. "Maker, Anders, I love you." And nothing matters except this, this astonishing thing they've created, found, been blessed with, made together. One of her hands cups his cheek briefly as she looks down at him, still moving around him. A brilliant smile flashes over her face, interrupted almost at once by a shaky gasp as the pressure she's building makes itself known.

The only thing sweeter to Anders than that smile is the way Hawke's lips part when she makes that sound. Then she moves just so, and his eyes slide shut, so he can't see her face, but he knows just what she'll look like anyway, because he can't keep still any longer, he's working with her and against her and it's brilliant what she does, whether she's trying or it's a natural talent or a bit of both.

He can't say more than love, meaningless repetition but the semantic import ceased to matter a few moments ago, and then her name, he's been hearing it used around the house consistently and it's slipped into his mind.

Marian. And he doesn't so much say it as breathe it, "Marian," and pushes upward, hard, unable to hold back.

Hawke is only dimly aware of the name he calls her at that point. She's only dimly aware that such things as words and names exist at all, because he's holding her hips and driving into her, or she's driving against him, or both, and there is no holding back, no longer any possibility of restraint. She comes undone above him, crying her pleasure aloud to the air, a sound older than any language, and he follows afterwards with his own wordless paean of exultation.

Thereafter follows a few minutes of nonsense murmuring as she kisses his face and mouth, tasting the sweat on his forehead and riding out the last of their climax. It's as she disengages, lying beside him once again, that she remembers. "Did you just call me Marian?" She sounds surprised more than anything; only her mother calls Hawke that, since Bethany left, and Anders surely knows it. Even Gamlen has learned to refer to her as Hawke. It's not a name she uses nowadays, and she hasn't introduced herself as Marian since she was a girl.

Edited 2012-01-10 20:44 (UTC)

"Hmm?" He's still a bit foggy himself. "Did I?" He supposes he must have. "That's your name, isn't it? Your mother seems to think so."

They do talk, sometimes. Sometimes even when Hawke is busy doing other things. The writing desk alone is loaded with tasks Anders does not envy. Were he less busy himself (even while ignoring the mage underground, he knows Darktown's quota of knife-fight wounds and bad falls down rough-hewn stairs will never be exhausted, with the occasional breech birth thrown in for variety), he would volunteer to help her sift the legitimate correspondence from the merely interesting.

"Should I not? I suppose it's a little like ... that rosey outfit you're always changing into when you get home. You've got the armor for outside, but you don't wear it in..."

this RP has a theme song

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