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Everyone always talks of their first love, first kiss, first fuck. For a long time, all Dorian can think of is his last one. It follows him like a shadow all the way from Tevinter to the southern lands and sinks into him, colder than frostbite. It destroys him, little by little, and he still holds it close and weeps its loss. He will hold it close for far too long, and when he no longer does, he will weep as he lets it go.
He would have said yes, Cole tells him.
With that, an old fire rekindles within Dorian. An obsession, a passion, a last love. Rilienus, sun-browned and laughing. Dorian would have left it all for him. In the end, he still did, but for himself. In the end, that was enough. But in the meanwhile, in the then, in the time where it all was happening—it was agony, betrayal, desolation. Sometimes, Dorian closes his eyes and thinks back, and the sharp stab of treason in his chest is just as bitter, just as poisoned, and he pulls back before he can let the memory rip him apart.
His last kiss. It’s early in the morning and Rilienus’s room is pearlescent with his seaside trinkets, the inside of seashells refracting light in pastel rainbows across the walls.
Hardly worth anything, but so very pretty, Rilienus says.
Like you, Dorian quips, and Rilienus laughs and bats his eyelashes at him.
Dorian kisses him then, slowly, thoroughly, expertly, Rilienus’s long and curved lashes tickling his cheekbones with each tilt of the head. Rilienus lets himself be kissed, smiles against Dorian’s lips and basks in the radiance of his love.
Had it been love? It had been. It had. Dorian knows better than to deny it now. Denying it does nothing to take the pain away. Denying it only makes it hurt more.
So Dorian kisses Rilienus, and this kiss is the last they’ll ever share, but he doesn’t know it yet. He won’t know it until months from now, years from now, when he has finally laid all his misbegotten hopes to rest and embraced true happiness with another being who radiates love right back. But that’s later, much later. Before that comes the uncertainty, the pain, the betrayal, and the gentle affection that screams as it dies. Now he is kissing Rilienus.