#willandherfandoms

[gremlinquisitor]

I have a prompt for you! “Are you jealous?” with Alistair :)

for @dadrunkwriting and @will-and-her-fandoms, after far too long - Cullen and Alistair at Skyhold, with a brief mention of Hawke. 

~1800 words, Cullen/Alistair, good for all ages, fade to black (if I upped the rating it would likely never get posted)

Read it here on AO3

“Come in.” Cullen doesn’t look up from the reports at the knock on the door. This time of night most people are asleep. Those who aren’t are welcome, and those who wouldn’t be welcome wouldn’t knock.

And those who wouldn’t be welcome, but would knock, are at least worth letting in before he fights them.

The corner of his mouth quirks up, and he shakes his head. It must be late; his mind is starting to wander. But he wants to have read all of these at least once before the morning, making notes in the margins, suggestions to bring to the table tomorrow. The Inquisitor’s independence grows daily, and he’s glad to see it, but he’s more glad when they come to decisions together around the war table.

He looks up, curious to see who other than him is still awake. He’s met by a familiar uniform in blue and iron grey, and a face somehow more and less familiar at once.

“Alistair.” He sets his quill aside and falls back in his chair, all but knocked back by surprise to see his old roommate. “They really are just letting anyone into the Inquisition these days.”

Alistair shrugs, lines at the corners of his eyes when he grins. He’s only just inside the door, arms folded across his chest, regarding him with a warm gaze that Cullen isn’t sure what to do with.

“I heard that Hawke had a friend, a Warden, that would be coming here to help us, but I never thought--” He stops himself, shaking his head and smiling back at Alistair. It’s a lie. Cullen had thought, as soon as he’d heard. Alistair had been the first name he’d thought of, even before the Hero of Ferelden. He’d thought, but he hadn’t dared to hope. It seemed too much to ask for after all this time. Alistair deserves peace, and he won’t find that here. But then it turned out to be true, and Cullen retreated to his office, his fear of what Alistair might think of him now overwhelming his desire to see him again.

“Oh, I had to come,” Alistair replies, taking a step towards the desk and settling his weight. “I had to see it for myself. Cullen Rutherford, Commander of the Inquisition’s forces? Teacher’s pet, finally given up on the Order?”

“Weren’t you supposed to be King or something?” Cullen fires back with a grin, hands folded on his chest. His heart flutters underneath them, every word feeling like a victory, a triumph that he’s able to speak at all.

“Nah.” Alistair scrunches his nose when he shakes his head, as if Cullen asked about a second helping of vegetables rather than the crown. “Queen Anora does a fine job without me, and I’m happier in this life.”

Cullen believes it, too. Alistair looks older but no worse for that, the last of the boyish roundness gone from his face, an easy confidence in his stance that Cullen doesn’t recall from their days together. He’s grown into a fine soldier, no doubt. He was never ambitious but always dedicated, wanted to be good at everything they were learning. And he was.

He’d been more of a natural at it than Cullen, but Cullen had kept up by sheer force of will, practicing at all hours, reading, sleeping, breathing the training until it started to feel like instinct, until he’d stopped having to think so much. It had frustrated him, that what he’d always wanted had turned out to be so difficult to achieve; even more so knowing that Alistair’s heart wasn’t in it.

“What about you?” Alistair asks, head tilted slightly. “How have you been?”

Cullen sighs, running a hand through his hair to scratch at the back of his neck. “Eleven years is a long time. Where do you want me to start?”

“I hear things,” Alistair replies. “I was in Kirkwall, briefly. I couldn’t believe you were there,” he breathes. “I couldn’t believe you were in another Circle.”

He crosses the room as he talks, arms falling to hang loosely at his sides, his steps slow, heavy. Deliberate, as he comes to stand beside Cullen’s chair, resting his weight on the corner of the desk.

“After Kinloch, I thought--”

Cullen looks up at him. “I couldn’t just leave. I… I wasn’t ready to stop being a Templar.”

It’s more complicated than that, and Cullen suspects that they both know it.

“And now?” Alistair asks, watching him with a gaze that Cullen would almost think was knowing, but his lyrium abstinence is a closely-held secret that not even Alistair would know.

“Now I’m doing this,” Cullen replies, spreading his hands wide. “I couldn’t keep following the Templars, not after…”

Alistair nods, the corners of his mouth pulling down. He saw Kirkwall, and what he hasn’t seen, Cullen assumes he’s heard.

“So… you and Hawke.” He’s had the words sitting on his tongue since he knew that Alistair was in Skyhold, and he hasn’t come up with a way of putting it that doesn’t sound like he’s asking about something he doesn’t want to know about. Or at least that he’s told himself he doesn’t want to know about.

Alistair sees through him immediately, one corner of his mouth pulling up into a smirk as he tilts his head, looking down at Cullen out of the corner of his eye. “Yes. She tracked me down to ask for my help with this red lyrium.”

Cullen is careful not to nod, doing his best to look surprised. With Hawke in Skyhold, Leliana saw an opening, sending Varric and some help to rescue two of her people from the dungeon of the Keep. The Prince’s research into red lyrium could be useful, but Cassandra insisted that asking for it would get them nothing. He suspects her mistrust is a holdover from when she went to him in search of Hawke, but Leliana had agreed to sending agents. He’s not surprised to hear that Hawke was helping Sebastian, but he is surprised that she would think a Grey Warden could be of use with their investigation.

“Why you?” Cullen asks. “You never even started taking it before you left for the Wardens.”

Alistair shrugs. “Desperation, I suppose. The Wardens need lyrium, even if I don’t. Deep Roads, Blight… Warden stuff.” He sighs. “I couldn’t help much, though. Warden-Commander Clarel was-- is looking for me, so I had to disappear for a while.”

“What do you think of her?” A dozen different ways to ask that question and that’s the one his treacherous brain decides on. It’s as if the mantle on his shoulders shrinks when he flushes under Alistair’s curious gaze; he’s too warm in his skin and everything he’s wearing fits poorly. He’d meant to ask if Alistair thought she could be trusted, if she seems stable. If she’s still haunted by Kirkwall the way he is, or some other way.

Alistair slides off the corner of the desk and steps up close into Cullen’s space. “Are you jealous?”

Cullen sputters, but doesn’t manage an answer before Alistair continues, smug and grinning.

“I think you are jealous, but for the life of me I can’t tell of whom, or why.”

Maker’s Breath, but he wants it to be a ridiculous accusation. There’s nothing there to be jealous of; he and Hawke were unlikely last-minute allies in their best moments, and he and Alistair… Well. A few stolen kisses behind the healer’s cabin all those years ago hardly give him any right to be jealous.

“Hawke’s a capable fighter, but she’s not you. She’s got a quick mind, as well, but she’s still not you.” He leans down, so close that his nose brushes against Cullen’s cheekbone, and his breath is warm on Cullen’s ear. “I could’ve stayed in that cave in Crestwood, you know. It’s a better hiding place, but you’re not there.”

The kiss is little more than a brush of Alistair’s lips to the corner of Cullen’s mouth. It could almost seem like a mistake. He can’t be sure that Alistair thought of him at all since then, and if he has, what sort of thoughts could they have been? Cullen curled up on the floor of Kinloch Hold, begging for death? Cullen in Kirkwall, broken but obedient, complicit in the start of a war? Is that what he wants Alistair to think of, if he thinks of him at all?

Cullen turns his head to catch Alistair’s mouth before he’s moved away. He thrills at the soft, delighted sound that Alistair makes when his kiss is answered, when Alistair smiles and pushes back just enough to eliminate any thought that this might not be what he wants.

The angle is awkward, but that’s solved easily enough when Cullen surges to his feet, catching Alistair’s face in his hands. He brushes his thumbs along Alistair’s cheeks, breathing in the scent of leather and metal and the road as he kisses him. Their noses bump as they both move at once, trying to figure out how they fit together now.

“How far under here are you?” Alistair mumbles as he tries to find somewhere on Cullen’s sides to touch that isn’t covered in armor or layer upon layer of cloth. He settles for grabbing hold of Cullen’s hips and pulling, not closing his mouth again after he’s spoken, catching Cullen’s lower lip between his own.

It sends sparks through him, tickling under his skin and lighting up inside him, and Cullen finds himself smiling back at Alistair.

“Stay the night and you can find out.”

Everything stops. Alistair goes still against him, then pulls back to look into his eyes. Cullen’s smile wilts, and he lets go of Alistair’s face as he takes a step away. It was too bold a suggestion, too soon, if it would ever have been wanted at all, and he feels panic squeeze a cold hand around his throat.

Alistair studies his face for a moment, wide-eyed with furrowed brows. “You-- Would you really want that? Me, here?”

Cullen nods, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and not nearly enough blood going to his brain for him to form a more cohesive answer.

This time when Alistair kisses him, there’s real force behind it, need and intent as he wraps his hand around the back of Cullen’s neck and starts to guide both of them towards the ladder.

“You sleep up there?” Alistair mutters, and Cullen nods again. “Still under a pile of furs that would warm half of Ferelden?”

Cullen chuckles, breaking the kiss when they reach the base of the ladder. “Why don’t you get up there and see for yourself. I’ll be right behind.”