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Time Passes Sweetly

Summary:

After time passes, Piper realizes she's ready to be lovers again. Blackwall has always been ready. Time then, passes sweetly.

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Work Text:

Between Maryden’s singing and the quiet laughter of her companions at the Herald’s Rest, Piper fell once again into an easy center. Finding herself at the front of the bar, Cabot generously refilling their tankards, it was the first time in quite a while where time passed with no trepidation. Time passed sweetly with sweet company.

Her company and drinking companion was a single man, though his laughter filled the room like the laughter of ten men. It was good to hear his laugh again. “Truly?” she asked him, still surprised he gave her the answer he gave earlier as she sipped on mead. “You aren’t opposed to Blackwall?”

He smiled at her. “No. I like the way you say it in fact.”

It was one of her first conversations with him since she came to see him a week ago, what should I call you? He didn’t know for a while, but after tonight with a few easy and sweet callings of “Blackwall” as they talked, Blackwall it would be. “Does it feel odd?” she found herself asking. “Did it ever feel odd?”

A long and pensive moment passed before there was an answer. At first, Blackwall said, yes it was odd. It wasn’t his name. His name was Thom Rainier and a Warden named Blackwall chose him to be a Grey Warden. Rainier thought if he took his name after he died, he might be the man Warden Blackwall thought he was. With the week passing since the trail, Piper had known. He was her Blackwall. It was as simple and easy as that.

She put her hand over his. On the other side of the bar, a hovering Cabot dispersed with his offers of more ale and mead. Since his judgement they’d been friends if not tentative lovers. She was hurt and he respected that, though she couldn’t stand to see him alone and sent a few of her other companions to check on him before she decided she could do it herself. That was when time passed awkwardly and no longer sweetly. Until tonight. It wasn’t the alcohol she realized, but their ease with one another. They were getting back.

If they were lovers—and the look they shared was no look of friends, as it was too soft, too weighted, and too full—Piper knew they were lovers. Slow and easy lovers perhaps, but indisputably carrying the weight between glances of those in love. There was no urgency or haste, and to some that was exactly what being a lover should entail.

“I think you are that man Warden Blackwall saw,” she said.

She thought there would be something if he was ready to be more than tentative. Piper assumed a gesture, a certain look in his eye or squeeze of her hand. She’d been searching for so long it didn’t occur to her that he’d been searching too. A knight, searching for his lady. She was always there.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

A moment passed. He kissed her palm and open hand like a knight would his lady. With a calm and steady assurance Blackwall rose. Piper followed. Taking her hand he led her to the stables. They shared long silences and gazes back and forth with their hands clasped. In the time after the trial after she decided to come to him, she thought she should fill silences with chatter and talk, lest silence weighed too heavily upon them. Yet this was more intimate than anything they could say to one another. Blackwall—and she would call him Blackwall because he was the man the true Warden Blackwall believed him to be—knew how to observe every part of her well, from her long red hair to the green of her eyes all while walking her to what he called a small home in the stables, tucked away from prying eyes. There were slight intakes of breath and his unabashed wonder. With every step he didn’t stop letting knew know how grateful he was, squeezing her hand and even chancing to kiss her cheek. Then at last outside the stables, he wrapped her in his arms and thanked her kindness, her want, her forgiveness.

“You were always that man Warden Blackwall saw,” she promised. “You were always my hero.”

Her hero he may have always been, but he was different that night. They were different. They were nothing but themselves from the moment they climbed to his loft and slowly undressed, Piper bare for him and Blackwall in only his breeches. There was no need be hurried. They had all the time in the world. Time could be cruel to people like them. Not tonight.

The drag of her nails down his back invited him as she laid bare underneath him as consumption and forgiveness and truth. They were intimate before he left for Orlais, though back then she assumed his desperation was due to anything but the truth. She knew why now, and knew this desperation to be a desperation of a different sort. She was so proud of him. Warden Blackwall would have been proud too.

She wouldn’t have thought him restrained before, but that was before. Blackwall sought her eyes before each movement with every touch deliberate. There was comfort in a world of only sound and skin with the moonlight from the open window only the faintest light. It was all so gentle reverence, his warm and calloused hand stroking her hip and thigh and entreating it to part. His intent was clear. She was going to feel so good. Then he was truly unrestrained, his head dipping to meet her in a kiss where he let his tongue drag against her open bottom lip to catch moans and sighs. Her arms locked around his neck, tugging on his hair as he descended her body. He didn’t have this sort of reverence before. This is my body, she thought to herself, and it’s on fire and he’s praising it, asking for my forgiveness. I forgive you and I forgive you, she wanted to shout. Just do this to me always, be with me always.

He hadn’t even touched her in ways to make her feel good yet. He excelled at making her feel wanted, kissing shapes and plains while kneading flesh and old scars, but when the time came for him to bury his head between her thighs she cried out with the newness. She didn’t forget how good his tongue felt, but bereft of it and bereft of him for too much time was like the first time he gave his mouth. He circled her clit with the tip of his tongue, moaning at her moans and causing only the sweetest vibrations that coupled well with the softness of his beard against her skin.

She reached for his hand. He was deft. He held her hand, their fingers clasping while the other began tracing the line of her seam. She spread her legs further. His finger inside her, he swirled it deep within, drawing small circles against the spot inside she could never reach. All this and he never stopped licking her clit. She let him know how good he felt as he she built and built, just needed a little more.

With his lips encasing her clit, he gave. She came.

She could have floated away but she couldn’t be anywhere but where he was. Above her again, his clothed cock against her belly, she shoved them off and he was all too willing to help her. He was pressing into her body, not a single inch of her save her face not enveloped by Blackwall. He was all rough spun edges and a smooth and sweet victory of a thousand battles, here and home to write his love to her. “Don’t leave in the morning please,” she begged, pressing him closer, if that was even possible. “Don’t let me wake up without you.”

“I’ll never hurt you again.”

“Don’t think you’re not dear to me. You are my hero.”

It broke her heart the first time he ever said she couldn’t dare think of him as special all that time ago on the battlements when they first came to Skyhold. Any residual heartbreak she had leftover from that conversation so long ago and any heartbreak she still had from his leaving her he made up tenfold, rising to his knees and inching himself inside her, bit by bit till she was filled and stretched to the brim. She watched him as he moved, his thumb drawing gentle circles on her clit. He took his pleasure well. She was sweet to him, letting her hands squeeze the sinews of his arms, the strength of his thighs. Her eyes adjusted to the moonlight and to him. He never let his eyes leave her. Had he done that before, let his eyes stray? Worry some part of himself would give away Thom Rainier? She wished she could turn back time and tell him during all their times together she loved both Thom Rainier and Blackwall. The only thing to do was make up lost time.

Lost time was no longer lost and time passed sweetly. She answered every pull of his body and in return he pulled her hands over her head, locking both of her thin wrists in his grasp. He wanted her to feel only him. She did. She knew him more than she’d known anyone, and when his thumb flicked her clit just so, adding more pressure, she came again while he was buried inside her, warm and bright.

He wanted her arms again. He sank against her body and she welcomed him, tossing a leg over his. He couldn’t be deeper and yet she needed him deeper still and everywhere. “I love you,” she chanted, and it was only when he came as brightly as she did, spurting and warm inside her did he repeat it a thousand times, I love you too.

Some time later she drifted, Blackwall throwing a blanket over their bodies. She closed her eyes, smelling his musk and the sweetness of hay with the sharpness of grass and the outdoors. This was her smell of sex. She wasn’t afraid of going to sleep because she believed him when he said he wouldn’t leave, but there was something else she couldn’t shake. With every second and every moment that passed, she mourned the passing clock.

When making love time was something to be swallowed whole. Now it was sweeter and too fragile in it’s passing.

He knew. He kissed her forehead. “I’ll be here,” he promised. “We ask so much of you, my lady. Sleep.”

“Never you. You never ask enough.”

He promised to make up for lost time in the morning. He’d ask everything of her if she wanted.

“I do,” she said. “I want everything.”

She slept, dreaming of everything, but mostly dreaming of the two of them.

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