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When he opens his eyes the light stabs into the back of his brain and he prays briefly to Falon'din to guide him into death. Even with his eyes squeezed back shut, it only feels like he's trapped the light in there and it's running around tearing up the sides of his brain and laughing. No, no, no, no. Creators, fuck this.
He hears something moving to his right, and turns his head because he can smell what it is, and is that weird, he doesn't care. His eyes open and the blurry features he sees gradually shift back into focus, and of course it's Bull.
"Hey," he says in that rasping rumble of his.
Lavellan struggles to look at his face through watering eyes. His heart instantly feels about ten pounds lighter. "Hi," he mumbles. He squints towards the window, flinches, looks away. He's got no idea what time it is aside from The Sun Is A Demon And I'm Going To Fight It. "How long?"
"Bout a day. No -- and a half. It was, uh... you know." Bull clears his throat, struggling for the first time that Lavellan can remember to keep his face straight. "You, uh... how you feeling?"
Turning his head towards him, Lavellan presses his brows together and takes a moment to genuinely take stock. He always does when Bull asks. It's important he be honest about it. "Like I had a house dropped on me."
"Yeah, they, uh -- they said you --" He shifts his weight from one side of his hips to the other. "Said it was touch and go. More go than touch." Bull leans forward with his elbows on his knees, grunting when he rearranges his enormous mass. "I coulda told them you're tougher than that."
He hears what Bull isn't saying. It hangs in the air, like smoke. I almost lost you. I was scared.
"I'm here," he says, content for the moment to lay there and look at him and think about what a strange world this is that he ever deserved to have someone like him. Bull sighs, and Lavellan is smiling when he pushes himself on his right elbow to reach for him with his left hand.
It stops. Something is wrong.
He turns his head to look at it, arrested in the motion as his eyes trace from his shoulder to his elbow and then the nothing that extends from that. The cut is clean and neat, unnaturally so, as if his arm was always meant to end precisely at the joint, though he cannot see the wound itself for the bandage that covers half of what's left of his arm, spotted with blood towards the end. His face shifts, something like dawning understanding crossing his features as Bull watches him take a long breath and slowly let it out.
"They said they saved as much as they could," he says, voice low. He knows exactly what this feels like. This loss. "That if we'd taken any longer you would have lost the whole arm. It was the freakiest shit I'd ever seen. Burning with this... green... thing."
He watches as Lavellan sits back on his elbow, his eyes on the stump that used to be his arm, and watches the splay of emotion shift and settle over his face. How his brows knit together the way they do when he's trying to puzzle something out, or how his mouth tightens and pulls down at the edges, or how his throat works convulsively with words that never make it pas this lips. Despair, then calm acceptance, then a slowly pooling sadness. A hint of anger somewhere in there. Desperate clawing relief.
This time when he reaches for him he doesn't let his hand stop until it cups his jaw, forces him to turn his head to look at him, right into the one good eye he has left.
"It's over," Lavellan says.
Bull's throat tightens. "Don't say that," he says. "It's just an arm. People live with less. You --"
"No, I don't mean that. I mean --" He takes a long, shuddering breath, sharp, unexpected, the air catching in his throat ragged as a knife wound. It's too much. Bull's arm folds around his back and hauls him in close enough that when Lavellan presses into him it's with an audible thump. His face squashed against his chest, the way it has been countless times when he's held him at night after their play, murmuring to him about what a good boy he is -- that's what he needs, right now.
Lavellan says, "It was killing me, Bull."
He knows. Lavellan had tried to hide it from him, but he had known from the start, before they'd started this carrying on. He'd seen the way it had pained him, how he'd let that cross his face distantly when he thought no one was looking, and he hadn't really been asleep all those times Lavellan had crawled out of bed at night, stumbling away from him to try to calm the burning in his hand and arm. He'd thought they'd had more time, but then they'd entered that freaky mirror shit, and it had gotten so much worse, so much faster --
"He took the Anchor," Lavellan murmurs. There's a wetness against his chest, but he doesn't pull him away to see the tears he knows are there. He can count on one hand the times he's seen Lavellan cry. Doesn't even need two fingers, actually. "He saved my life."
Maybe he's objectively right and this is a good thing after all. Doesn't feel like it. Feels kind of more like an awful, shitty thing, to be exact. His arm presses tighter until he can feel Lavellan gently spread onto his chest.
"When I get a hold of that bastard," he grumbles into his hair, "I'm going to grab him by the neck and squeeze until his head pops like an egg."
Lavellan laughs, there's an edge of hysteria to it. "Eggs crack, Bull, they don't pop."
"Then I'm going to shake him until I scramble his brains."
"Stop." He laughs twice, two quick breathless exhalations, not amused exactly but... something else. Sad. Tired.
"Make an omelet," he mutters rebelliously. Lavellan laughs again but Bull is thinking of the deep spike of terror in his chest when that mirror had gone black, how he had pounded against it and roared and bellowed at Dorian to do something already and how the Vint had hollered back what am I, a magician?! while Cole had paced around muttering feverishly to himself uselessly and there was absolutely nothing he could do, no way in, no way to follow where his Kadan had gone. He's furious all over again. "Pop it. You know when you -- hard boil 'em, and the shell cracks, and a little bit of the white stuff comes out and --"
"Stop," Lavellan says again, fingers curling over his chest into fists. His chest is shaking, half-laughing, half-crying. "Stop. Stop. Katoh. Ew. Gross. Katoh."
He stops, rumbling, and allows himself to be content simply to feel him breathing against him, soft, gentle, alive. He's alive, that's what matters.
Fuck. He loves him. He hadn't counted on that, had planned on a fling, figuring he could give the Inquisitor what he desperately needed and everyone would have a good time, get what they wanted. Should have known better, since the first time they came back from slaying a high dragon and Lavellan had dutifully swallowed the toxic sludge the qunari called liquor, never one to back down from a challenge. When he'd watched him arm-wrestling Rocky and Krem, who had watched pitying as he'd thrown his whole weight against their arms and hadn't been able to get either to move.
When he'd carried him back to his quarters after he'd burned himself out with the healers trying to save their men after battle. When the candles burned down all the way and he'd fallen asleep over letters and correspondence and paperwork he struggled to read. When he'd grabbed Bull by the arms, looked him dead in the eye, and ordered him to pick him up and throw him into a pack of Venatori, and when he had balked, thinking Cassandra would murder him for endangering the Inquisitor, how Lavellan had cried, but the mayhem, Bull! The mayhem!
When he'd watched him put up posts in pouring rain to rebuild the ruins of villages in Crestwood. When he'd watched him stitch together a ball out of scraps of leather and played with refugee children, or whooping and crowing chasing blighted wolves to defend the halla in the Exalted Plains with the young scouts of that Dalish clan. Or covered in blood, grinning madly with a staff in hand while their enemies turned tail and fled.
Or staring down that wanna-be god in the face. Plunging the bladed end of his staff into that lyrium-infested dragon. Toe to toe with a sareebas hopped up on lyrium. Facing down the Viddasala.
Crazy-ass elf.
"Hey, Kadan."
Lavellan looks up, never removing his cheek from Bull's chest. The scar tissue feels different, harder, ragged around the edges. It's nice. Bull's looked down on him in this position or something like it many times, but, well... usually Lavellan has his mouth wrapped around his cock, so that's different. "Mm?"
"You still wanna get married?"
He watches his face break into a slow smile, watches the joy spread through his eyes.
"Yes," he says. No hesitation. No fear. No excuses.
Bull hunkers down and hauls him out of the cot and into his lap instead, arms tight around his waist, which is small enough he could wrap both hands around it and still have his fingers touch, but his hands splay over his back instead, holding him there firmly. They'll have to get up, and figure out the specifics, and worry about what comes next, but for now -- for now he needs to touch him, to feel his beating heart under his hand.
And imagine fucking the shit out of him in one of those fancy Orlesian wedding dresses.
"Kadan," he murmurs.
Lavellan reaches for him and this time touches his jaw with his one remaining hand, his eyelashes wet and matted, pale and sweaty and more beautiful than he's ever seen him.
"Ma vhenan."