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?"

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[birdhousesoul]

And now perhaps she sees why, when she joked she'd lock him up to keep the Templars off him, he didn't take the opportunity to flirt.

He lets her kiss him, unsure why that is her response to hearing all of what she's just heard, most of which hasn't cast Anders in a very good light. He likes being kissed, so he's not going to object. His arm is trapped under the pillow and he'd like to return her embrace, so he rolls them both a quarter-turn, pulling her atop him, careless of the weight, and twines his arms about her waist. She did reinvent kissing, he thinks, after all, whether she'll admit it or not. It's certainly different to kiss Hawke than to kiss anyone else.

So, of course, he has to tell her that, which means he has to break off kissing her. "You did some kind of arcane research in Lothering, I'm sure of it, just to develop unique kissing abilities. An elven courtesan sprang out of concealment in a haystack and taught you everything she knew. That's got to be it."

[questionablewit]

Hawke laughs, kissing his nose, then his cheek. "I'm tempted to refuse to tell you anything, just to see what other unlikely theories you'll concoct. What's unique about the way I kiss?" Granted, kissing Anders is unlike kissing anyone else. But she attributes that partly to skill on his part, and partly to love on both of theirs.

[birdhousesoul]

"I can't quite quantify it yet. I haven't kissed you enough to capture all the little details. All I can say is that I've done more than my fair share of kissing, and nothing comes close to what you do." He stops short of saying anything about enchantment, because no reminder of Sandal should ever be spoken in this bed. "Out with it, now, I've unburdened myself of practically my entire life story. The least you can do is regale me with tales of pastoral amours. And you kissing women, pastoral or not." He can hate the idea and really like it, all at once.

[questionablewit]

"Mm." She kisses him again, paying slow and careful attention to each nuance of it and assuming he'll do the same. If he doesn't, his loss. "Well, when you do figure it out, let me know, hmm?"

She shifts position so she's half on him and half on her side, using his chest as a pillow. It's a bit more comfortable for storytelling than holding herself above him. "Let's see, my sordid sexual history, hmm? Not that sordid, really. Downright prosaic." She makes a vague gesture above their entwined bodies, a sketch of a horizon. "Picture, if you will, a small farming community, and in it a fairly gawky young girl named Marian. Looks a bit like me but with much longer hair, usually pulled out of the way or braided, which makes it easier for her to stick her nose into everyone's business. Which she does without shame." Hawke grins at her imagined younger self. It was a good childhood, for the most part; she enjoyed being Marian.

"Something of a mischief-maker, forever getting into trouble, and forever curious about things." Some things never change. "And on that note, picture if you will a fairly ordinary farmboy named Lonny, who wasn't anything particular to write home about but who tended the animals on his uncle's farm carefully, instead of kicking them when no one was looking like some of the other town brats, and who had rather nice brown eyes, and who was sweet, if quiet. And then picture a hayloft and a certain amount of experimentation that took place here and there over several months."

[birdhousesoul]

"Ah. I know your weakness. You like a man who's kind to animals." He finds it more difficult to imagine a young Marian than she might think, and it's mostly that he has a hard time filling in the setting around her. He's seen the landscapes and the rural accoutrements, he knows Ferelden backwater towns and fields, but the life itself eludes him. Forever getting into trouble, and forever curious about things. Just rambling about, as a child, with no supervision, no one to reel her in if she seemed likely to veer outside their control. No one to give chase if she ran ... and why would she run? She had a home. She had people she loved.

"I'm picturing the farm boy. He's nowhere near as dashing as I am."

[questionablewit]

"One of my weaknesses, maybe, I have a few. And no, not dashing at all. But good-hearted." She shrugs, as much as she can from this position. "It wasn't young love. It wasn't even a crush, not for either of us. Well, perhaps a bit of puppy love on his part, in hindsight, but I'm afraid I didn't take much notice. Adolescent fumblings for the most part, done slowly in snatched moments. We neither of us had much free time. In his case there was farmwork, which is not only time-consuming but constantly going on at all hours of the day and sometimes night. In my case..."

She shifts, turns a bit, looking up at the ceiling without seeing it. "Father worked as a carpenter there. Not an exceptional one, but he could get things done. It was deliberate on his part, I've always thought, part of how he worked to appear ordinary. Be skilled, but not too skilled, not enough to draw notice, just enough to fill in a gap so people overlook you. But I saw one of his staves once; it was finer work than anything he produced for Lothering, and I'm sure he'd made it himself." She shakes her head. "Anyway. We helped him with that, which mostly involved chopping a lot of wood. Where I developed my early muscles. But evenings were spent on our education. He'd had a good one, either in the Circle or wherever he'd lived beforehand, and he was determined to teach us as much as he could. Mother too, and of course since she grew up here--" In this house, even, and that's still strange to imagine. Her mother living here without her, years ago, before she was born. "--well, both of them were determined. That took up most nights and spare moments of the day, along with other things, so getting away to learn about sex with Lonny took some scheduling. That was an education I really didn't want them to know about."

[birdhousesoul]

"The Circle," he confirms, "most likely, would have given your father a very good education indeed." Another reason it's hard to convince some refugees that Circle life isn't paradise. Free food, shelter, a career set for life, an education; all in all, more than they can expect to scrounge for themselves in Darktown, or the Old City slums. "Better than some nobility might be able to acquire, depending." It's a parenthetical comment, absolutely irrelevant to Lonny the farmboy and his hayloft idyll, and Anders reminds himself they are not having a conversation about Malcolm Hawke, they are having a conversation about things Malcolm Hawke hopefully never knew. "So all this in the hayloft, this was more a collaborative learning endeavor. Whose idea was it, I wonder?"

[questionablewit]

"Oh, mine, entirely. Lonny was my willing accomplice but I was the instigator." One of her legs slides along his, unthought, a shifting of skin against skin for its own sake. "It was sweet, in retrospect. Not at all a bad way to learn. Might have been better if at least one of us had known what we were doing, and there were plenty of awkward moments along the way, but we muddled through eventually."

Hawke goes silent, because this is the difficult part of the story, and she's tempted to gloss over it entirely. But it's relevant, and this is Anders, and he's just been showing her some of his scars; she can't deny him the same courtesy. "So what was my sixteenth year, for the most part, plus a little before and after. Not long after I turned seventeen, my father died. It was Blight sickness, over almost as soon as it began, nothing anyone could do about it." It still hurts, years down the line; the shock of it, how quickly he'd been taken from them, how entirely helpless they'd been to fight it. No handy Grey Wardens with a "rescue", or at least an alternative. It wasn't just the horror of what was happening to Bethany that had spurred Hawke to choice-that-wasn't-a-choice, down in the Deep Roads; it was memory. She knew that death, and it was an ugly one.

She sighs, returns to the narrative. "That...changed everything. No more experimenting with Lonny, I had other things to do. By the time Carver and I headed out to join the army a few years later, Lonny was married, in fact. They seemed happy enough, so hopefully all those experiments stood him in good stead, at least." She wonders if they suvived the fall of Lothering, and spares a moment to hope so. There hadn't been an opportunity to find out about the other villagers' fates in the mad scramble after Ostagar, racing to keep ahead of the darkspawn and only managing to keep pace.

[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."