Work Text:
"No," Dorian says. It is, absurdly, the first thing he says, the word escaping on reflex at the sight of the Bull. It pulls at his lips, dry as they are. He feels it in his bruised chest. "No," he says. "You can't be in Tevinter."
"Dalish," the Bull says, without looking away from Dorian, "you guys checked all the bodies?"
"Yes," Dalish says. She's hovering behind the Bull, her pale face oddly clear in the low light, the lines of her vallaslin making her cheeks seem hollow, the cheekbones emphasised. Skeletal. "All dead."
"Run one more check," the Bull says. "Look in the damn cupboards while you're at it. Never know where they'll be hiding."
She nods sharply and turns away, and the room seems darker again. But the Bull is fumbling with something, and a lantern sputters to life, every line of that beloved face made violently clear in the first flare of it.
"Crap," the Bull says. "They really got you bad, huh?"
Dorian shrugs, offers his hands palm-up—as close as he can get to spreading them, with the manacles cold around his wrists. The movement twinges through his shoulder, down to his elbow. The stretch aches low in his spine, frozen from too many hours sitting back to the wall.
He smiles.
"What is it we say about assassination attempts and so on here? I've hurt myself worse fooling around in bed?"
"More of a kidnapping," the Bull says. His mouth is tense at the corners. "Dorian—"
"Yes, yes," Dorian says. "Maker, I don't think my feet have been dry in days. To say nothing of my arse. Shall we?"
"Yeah," the Bull says. The slightest unsettled hesitation. "Sure, Kadan. I got you." His fingers slip twice as he goes about prying Dorian free from his bonds. Stutter against Dorian's palm. Against his calf.
Come to rest, shaken by small tremors, against Dorian's bruised cheek.
Dorian's magic is flowing again, spreading into his hands and his feet, a tingling sort of feeling like coming in from the cold.
"You good to stand?" the Bull asks, and the real question is another one, framed in the furrows around the Bull's eye, in the angry set of his jaw.
"Of course," Dorian says, but he stumbles against the Bull's chest when he tries, leans his forehead against the warm living skin, closes his eyes. Metal and blood. His teeth are gritted against the pain in his ankle and knee. A ludicrous thing, to be dragged bodily from one's horse, slammed to the ground by the crushing weight of a spell. Thrown into some tasteless little hole in the ground while one's captors fought over how best to make a point of one's death. Oh, I don't know, I think posting one body part at a time to the Lucerni would be best—
"Right," the Bull says.
His arms close around Dorian, a clinging hug that becomes a gentle lift. A grunt at the weight of him.
"Come on," the Bull says, "work with me here." The intimate brush of his hand against the back of Dorian's neck.
"Yes, yes," Dorian shifts his weight as well as he can. "How long have you been wanting to do this? Sweeping me off my feet. Honestly."
"Guess if you've still got the energy to be mouthy you're gonna be OK," the Bull says.
"I'll be mouthy on my deathbed, thank you."
"Katoh," the Bull says, and his arms tighten around Dorian, the grip too hard for comfort, urgent. Some frightened quality to his voice, barely there, barely definable. Slipping out. And that means—that means something. "Not talking about that crap right now, thanks."
Dorian sighs against the Bull's skin. "Yes, yes, very well."
Now that he's held by arms and not by shackles, his stomach twists at the smell of the place—twists, too, in hunger. A dizzy exhaustion is sinking over him. Here it is: the closeness of collapse, the thing that he hasn't had the luxury of.
Rather annoying, really.
Elfroot and embrium, sticking in the throat. The pain in his shoulder has faded, but his ankle still aches.
"Pretty sure he's not meant to be this good a patient, Chief," someone says—Stitches, it must be Stitches.
"I'm not a good patient," Dorian says. "I'm unconscious."
He's in a bed, remarkably enough—the mattress of wool, no down to cover it. The blanket thrown over him smells, mercifully, of the Bull—settled him, when he woke for the first time in a thrashing panic, until the Bull's hands could smooth his hair back from his face, cup his jaw.
But if they've been foolish enough to take him to some inn—
Breathe, Pavus.
If they've taken him to an inn, the Bull will have an unfairly plausible cover story in place already.
"Hurt too much?" Stitches asks, hands pausing in the work of binding a poultice in place.
"No, no, by all means, I don't have any need of feeling in my arm."
"That means keep going," the Bull says.
"Yes, Ser," Stitches says. "I do speak the language. I can't imagine where I learnt it."
"Yeah, yeah."
The distinctive sound of the Bull standing: the wooden moan of a chair, the way that the Bull groans as he settles his weight comfortably, the shift of his weight from one foot to the other as he works out the state of his joints.
"Hey," the Bull says. Shadow falls across Dorian's face, and he shifts to look up at the Bull, ignoring Stitches' muttered curse.
"Hello," he says. "I regret to tell you that Magister Pavus is temporarily indisposed. Would you like to leave your card with the footman? That's you, Stitches."
"No chance," Stitches says. "Definitely Grim."
"Think he'll see me," the Bull says; bends to scratch his nails gently across Dorian's scalp, through the mess of his hair. A frown drawing his eyebrow down, the lines of his scars pulling at it in the old familiar way.
Something to be talked about, then. Or fought over, perhaps.
Just not quite yet.
"Don't have too much fun," Stitches says, washing his hands in the basin of water on the side table. "It's bad for your stomach."
"I defy anyone to have fun under these conditions," Dorian says.
"Hey, Kadan," the Bull says. "We've managed worse." But all he does is sit down beside Dorian, leaning himself heavily back against the headboard, and stay there until Dorian falls asleep.
The place is an inn, yes. But vines trail down over the windows, and there are no barrels in the storeroom—only the lingering stale smell of hops to witness that anything was ever there. The door hangs crooked, digs its corner into the soft earth outside, the lower hinge rusted through.
They sit by the dead hearth, the two of them alone. Spiderwebs in the rafters and a litter of last year's leaves on the floor.
"I'm guessing the town moved when the Imperial Highway was fixed up," the Bull says. "Kind of a staging post, and the road used to be good, but there's a fancy bridge over a gorge to the west. Looks new."
"Then I suppose we're near Harach's Crossing," Dorian said. "Oh, don't look like that, I should know it. The Magisterium spent six months arguing about the repairs to the wretched thing, not to mention whether it should be renamed to something more auspicious and who would attend the opening."
There is an exhaustion in him that's hard to shake, even after days of rest. A difficulty in sleeping, a disorientation. His heart beats too fast in the dark. He feels himself a skeleton which moves an unwilling body, or a thing dead in the dark but still dreaming, almost like that boy who haunted the Inquisition. Like one of his own corpses.
"You're not alright, huh?" the Bull asks, and Dorian can only guess how his expression slipped, what tightness in his body betrayed him.
"I'm hardly an invalid, thank you," he says, sharp. Oh, yes, lash out. Charming.
"That's not what I mean."
Dorian sighs. "No, I suppose it isn't."
"I thought," the Bull says, "you were dead. When you stopped talking. I thought I was just out for revenge. It was—ugh."
His hands are curled into fists in his lap.
Once in his life, the Bull lost himself to that. Revenge. Confiding words, spoken into Dorian's hair, a quiet iteration of an ongoing argument. The gilded rooms of the Winter Palace pressing in around them. It was a bad time, he said. Everything was just—red. Don't even know what I did.
You loved him, Dorian said. This Vasaad.
Yeah. The Bull loved him. A love between friends and comrades. Intimate.
But not like this. Not less. But different.
Can't ask you not to die, but—
"I know," Dorian says.
There are often easy silences between them, but this one expands slowly in Dorian's chest until he's not certain he could speak if he had words.
The Bull stands, the chair scuffing noisily on the uneven floor.
"Not your fault," he says. Leans against the wall beside the hearth, head tipped as far back as far as his horns allow. Scrubs at his face with a hand that's still sooty from digging through the mess of another house in search of supplies, leaving a smear across his brow and cheek.
But if I'd been there—
They both know why he wasn't. Why he couldn't have been. Dorian won this argument three years ago; he'd win it again now.
"Perhaps a little."
The Bull shrugs, one-shouldered.
"Not a damn thing to do about it. You're alive."
"I thought," Dorian says, "that I was dead, too."
The darkness. The sending crystal glowed gently for him until they took it, and then there was nothing unless they lit the torches to check on him. No counting the hours and no guessing the ways to break free. Only anger. Only the itch of magic trapped in his stomach, twisting in on itself, unable to flow.
Only whispers in his head.
We could help.
"Screw it," the Bull says. "Want to do something more fun?"
The business of cleaning oneself, soap and scrapers, razor and cloth. The sun falls through the half-covered window, very warm for the season, and so it's quite comfortable to be naked. To enjoy feeling the Bull following his progress with rapt attention. The little bit of heat that the awareness of being watched spreads inside him. The latch on the bedroom door still holds, and so here they are, hidden.
How much easier it is to shave with no pain in one's joints—although Dorian has no complaints about the assistance the Bull offered on the day after the rescue—his hand on Dorian's throat, his thumb following the sweep of the blade.
All the same.
"I'll have to return very soon," Dorian says. "The Lucerni—I can't reasonably leave Mae to wonder if I'm alive or not for much longer. And besides, I'm the only competent one in the lot. Someone will get overexcited and challenge the Archon to a duel soon, I expect."
They have won this time together: the slow healing of Dorian's ankle, too much of an obvious show of weakness for the vipers of the Magisterium to pass up on. The fading of his bruises. Yes, he will return looking untouched—untouchable.
But he's almost there, bodily; how he feels is irrelevant in this equation.
When they fucked last night it was oddly gentle and very slow. Not really the way they usually get when they're about to part.
"Yeah, better not let them do that," the Bull says. "My boys are gonna need to hit something soon too. Moving out tomorrow?"
"Barring all the usual bandit attacks, seasonally improbably storms, and so on and so forth—I should think so. I'm rather looking forward to the expression on Gallus' face when I stride into the Magisterium, cape billowing dramatically."
"You're going to start wearing a cape?"
"Oh, no, just for the occasion. It seems to call for a little extra something, doesn't it?"
"I can think of a few more things," the Bull says. He's looking—easier. It doesn't mean he's happy, Dorian isn't such a fool as to think so. But the rawest edge of it is tucked carefully away. They're both dressing themselves for the world.
The Bull reaches for Dorian anyway, a hand on the hip, fingers splayed on Dorian's arse, suggestive. He's grinning.
"I'm sure you can."
"Hey, think about it," the Bull says. "The guy I love, going to kick those damn shitty Magisters' doors in, looking all badass, with a great big love-bite right about here—"
Dorian's pulse jumps under the Bull's still lips; tilting his head seems so natural and so loaded at once.
Of course it's somewhere my clothes would actually cover, he thinks, slightly dizzy with the promise of it. Wretched man.
"I loathe you," he says, and presses his palm to the back of the Bull's skull. "You're utterly unbearable. Oh—"
The deep ache of it and the sharp sting.
The Bull's arms gather him up, without pain this time, and although they're bare body to bare body, although they'll certainly fuck later, it isn't sex that Dorian thinks of, but something else, elusive and precious.
They are rewritten here, in some small way. Reinscribed with beloved old lines, cutting through the surface of the dark and the fear.
Dorian closes his eyes.