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It was, as most things were in Tevinter, about coin. Truly, few other things could have swayed the Magisterium into contacting the Qun in search of peace, of all things. Dorian read the news on the paper with incredulity and raised brows, though he was pretty certain this would not affect his life in any way. The war in Seheron was as far away from him as it could be—he was the firstborn son of an Altus mage, and thus had no obligation to go into the jungle to die from a blow to the head or an axe to his stomach.
The Imperium had spent all too much on that war to claim that Maker-forsaken island, from coin to disposable soldiers to research on the best ways to counter the Qun’s military technology. And perhaps the Archon, perhaps the Divine, perhaps both, had decided it was better to just find a way to ignore their belligerent, beastly neighbors rather than waste all their coin on waging an interminable war.
Perhaps it was wise. Dorian didn’t care much about it, at least until his father sat him down and told him that they needed something to make the peace be official, and that they’d thrown around the idea of a symbolic union between a Qunari and someone from Tevinter.
“And?” Dorian asked, crossing his arms as he leaned onto the wall, watching his father warily. It had only been a few years since the failed ritual, the arguments, the misery of it all. If he was going to try to marry him off again, this time to a Qunari…
Halward pressed his palms together and sighed. “Most other Altus heirs your age are already married, Dorian. You know I… want you to be happy, despite your inclinations, and I know you are not happy here.”
Dorian’s brow furrowed. “So what? You got me married off to some beast woman? Close enough to a man for you?” he bit out.
Halward shook his head. “No. We are in talks of you marrying a Ben-Hassrath who has been away from Seheron for a year now. He calls himself the Iron Bull.”
“He,” Dorian echoed, in utter disbelief. After all that happened, all he had to go through due to his wrongness, his deviacny, he was going to be given for some ox-man to fuck, as a way to make their peace official? After everything, he was going to have a life that only existed in his most shameful dreams, where there was a possibility of domesticity and not secret trysts in the backs of pubs? “Really? Did you offer, or did one of your colleagues know about…” He grit his teeth. “About me, and decided to…?”
“Does it matter?” Halward said. “The Qun thinks of it more like an alliance, but it will be a marriage nonetheless. Peace is in your hands, son.”
Peace should not be in the hands of an invert twenty-four-year-old Altus heir, Dorian found, but he guessed he had little choice in the matter. And it was better this than to be married to a woman who’d look down at him, with all the rumors of his deviancy, and would never respect him, even if he tried his best to love her as a friend would.
“Fine,” he said, finally. “When am I meeting the unlucky guy?”
“Tomorrow, if you’d like. He should be arriving to Minrathous tonight.”
Dorian’s stomach twisted with a strange kind of nerves. Who could’ve thought this, of all things, would happen to him? That he would be married off like in some bad romance novel? At least it wasn’t to a woman. At least it was true to him in one way, even if wrong and false in most every other.
“Alright.” He lifted his chin up, kept his back straight. “I’ll meet him, then.”
The next night, Dorian was alone in one of the most expensive restaurants that side of Minrathous, waiting for his date. For his future husband. For the man he would spend the rest of his life with in the name of peace. He wondered how, exactly, the papers would spin the news—calling anything between two men marriage was strange, so perhaps even if it was clearly that they’d call it something else. An union. A pact.
He was taken out of his musings by heavy boot-clad footsteps approaching him. He turned to see him in the hallway and his breath caught in his throat, eyes widening a modicum. He was… really tall, as most of his kind were, but he swore that if he stood he’d get to the Qunari’s shoulder at most. He wore an eyepatch and even through his formal dress he could tell the muscle beneath his clothes, the effort of war in how he held himself up.
Dorian thought of his trysts with Soporati soldiers, the muscle hard and defined underneath his touch, nothing like the soft squishy bits of his fellow mages. He shook the thought away and met his future husband’s eye.
“…The Iron Bull, I take it?”
The Iron Bull nodded. “Dorian Pavus,” he greeted. He slid onto the seat in front of Dorian and watched as one of the waitresses came with their dinner, crustacean pasta with a healthy amount of spices. “…I imagine you must not be very excited about this.”
Dorian snorted. “What? No, I’m thrilled,” he drawled sarcastically as he took a sip of wine. “Every Altus boy dreams of marrying the enemy to secure a peace no one really thought was possible.”
The Iron Bull snorted at that, shook his head. “Is that what your side is calling it? Marriage?”
Dorian shrugged. “Little else to call it.”
“Just an union,” the Bull suggested as he twirled pasta into his fork, “a symbolic showing of peace. I suppose it is more dramatic to marry.”
“What do you know about it? Marriage, I mean. You Qunari don’t even have parents, much less weddings.”
“I spent the last year outside of Seheron and Par Vollen,” he explained, “I have seen many things in the way of human tradition.”
“Huh. Didn’t know they let you leave.”
The Bull scoffed. “I did my part at Seheron, so they allowed me to take a break as a spy.”
As a spy? For a moment Dorian worried this entire operation was a farce—surely, the Qunari could not be content to just stop this war that had been waged for centuries, not when they believed in spreading the word of their belief system to the entirety of Thedas. Was the idea that he’d tell the Bull every single detail and secret of the Imperium so he’d write home about it?
Dorian’s brow twitched and he let out a sigh. He didn’t want to deal with this. Even with the promised normalcy of marriage, he almost preferred fucking the other heirs his age. That way he wouldn’t be tied down, wouldn’t have his freedom put to the side in favor of great plans bigger than him, whatever way those great plans swayed.
“And what about you? What great ills did you get into to make you marry the enemy?”
Dorian was taken aback by that, and he laughed forcibly. “I’m just doing us all a favor,” he said. “Better me than an innocent young maiden, forced to deal with whatever mosnter you carry between your legs.”
The Bull’s brows raised. “Already thinking about that, Pavus? I’d heard of vint perversion, but you surprise me if this is what comes up on the first date.”
He burst out laughing at that, more honest than before, and he grinned lopsidedly as he chewed on his pasta. After swallowing, he looked up at the Bull through his lashes, enjoying the way the Qunari seemed to be mildly surprised by his open interest.
“Like every other human you’ve talked to hasn’t thought about it,” he replied. “But alright. We can keep that for when we have to consummate our marriage.”
The Bull hummed and took a bite of one of the crab legs, like he was considering this deeply.
“I don’t think they’re going to check if we made it official in your way, Pavus,” he said after a while. “You could just say what you want to do.”
Dorian’s face split into a wicked grin at that. At least he got a match in regards to his love for verbal sparring and teasing, if anything.
A month later, Dorian was sent off to Seheron to live with his new partner. It was neutral ground and what they had been fighting for in the first place, and so it had been decided by the Ariqun that the Bull and Dorian were to live there rather than in Par Vollen or Tevinter.
Dorian had never set foot in Seheron. He was able to appreciate it for what it was rather than just a place of unending bloodshed: it was a picturesque beach followed by dense jungle, with a small city opposite of where Tevinter military forces disembarked. The ship he was in hugged the beach as it sailed towards the city, and so he got a good look at what was by the coast now that the fighting was done. Soporati soldiers spoke stiffly amongst themselves and eyed the Antaam cautiously as they did much the same. Closer to the city, some of the warriors from either side spoke to each other—Dorian watched from his spot on the deck as a Qunari soldier shared a meal by an open fire with a human, much more taken by this show of peace than any of the dense legalese of the newspapers.
Dorian was taken into the city with one servant escorting him. Seheron City was all stone and brick quickly put together between battles, a mix of Tevinter and Qunari style building on top of each other after every attempt to claim the city as one’s own. Some of the paths were scorched dark, no doubt from gaatlok or fire magic or both, and there were larger buildings—local authorities’, undoubtedly—that were half-collapsed. War had its sticky fingerprints all over the city, and it would take more than talk to make it look anew.
Dorian couldn’t help but eavesdrop as they walked through the city towards the civil office. Warriors were easy to pick apart from other people with their armor and bigger builds, and he leaned forward to hear them speak of peace and war as he kept moving.
“I don’t believe for a second the Archon actually wants to end this war,” a Soporati soldier told another one. “It’s got to end with a surprise attack when everything’s set in stone.”
A few feet away, a Qunari warrior thought much of the same.
“We can’t give up the fight now,” he said gruffly. “Not when the true fighting has not even begun. I cannot understand what the Triumvirate has planned…”
“It is not your job to understand, Hissrad,” another Qunari said. He held a strange device in his hand, like a baton, and there was a chained up beast behind him. A saarebas, that Dorian knew, and he shuddered to think he was supposed to now coexist with these people that collared those who held the same power he did. “Your job is to obey the Arishok.”
“I know,” Hissrad replied.
Dorian walked out of earshot before he could keep listening. After a while on this walk, he could see the civil office by the distance; it was a Tevinter style building, with high marble walls greyed out from a lack of maintenance. Outside the main door was his husband-to-be, the Iron Bull, wearing a suit yet having a weapon strapped to his back, like he was ready for the fight to break out again.
He tried to keep his cool. He had never imagined this for himself, beyond the vague flashes of what a life hiding his true self would look like—marry an Altus girl, have children, throw himself into research and work so as to not deal with his miserable existence. The wedding and marriage itself never quite appeared in these ideas of his future; maybe because he actually quuite liked weddings for their drama and theatrics. This one, he could tell by the lack of extended family on either side, would have much less fanfare.
“Dorian,” the Bull greeted as he finally got to the door. “The trip treat you well?”
He nodded. “Yes. You?”
The Bull smiled. “I’ve been here a couple days. It’s fine. Come in, they have the papers ready.”
Dorian obeyed. The servant settled outside, relieved of his task, and so Dorian only had to follow the Bull through a maze of corridors until he was in a small office room, with paperwork, a painter sitting down with his easel in front of him and two imposing figures: the Arishok and the Archon themselves.
Remembered for posterity as the invert who sealed the peace deal. Wonderful.
The Arishok leveled at them, up and down, eyes seeming to scan for any errors or weaknesses. The Archon, a tall man with a dark look in his eye and the recognizable pronounced chin of his House, was doing much of the same.
“So here you are,” the Archon said. “I am glad we can make it official. It is a matter of signing the papers, exchanging words, and then letting the painter work on his sketch.”
“Dorian Pavus. Hissrad,” the Arishok greeted. “Come. The papers are written in both Trade and Qunlat. You can read either, but you must sign both.”
Dorian wondered, briefly, if each contract was different, if there were clauses one would not agree to in the language they did not speak. But as the Bull’s eye roamed over the Trade contract, he realized he must be able to read it, too.
He cleared his throat. “Bull?”
The Bull’s face twitched. “Call me Hissrad here, Dorian,” he said, as much of a plea as it was a command.
“Hissrad, then,” he said, looking up at him cautiously. “Can you look over both and tell me if they say the same thing?”
The Arishok’s face twisted in outrage. “You think we are deceiving you?”
Dorian shrugged. “As much as I think the Imperium could be deceiving you in the Trade contract,” he said simply. “If Hissrad can read both, I’d prefer him to.”
The Archon cleared his throat. “I believe this is a reasonable request, Arishok. We have a storied relationship, and it is best to not leave any stone unturned, yes?”
The Arishok nodded, and that was enough cue for the Bull to take the Qunlat contract in hand as Dorian did the same with the Trade one. He read through it carefully, almost expecting some outlandish caveat about what he was supposed to do with his Qunari husband-to-be, but found nothing out of the ordinary. After he was done, he offered the contract to the Bull, grateful they were not long and that he seemed to be a fast reader.
Of course, the Bull could lie to him about the contents of the Qunlat contract and tell him it was all the same. But he wanted to believe that this man, thrown into the same weird situation as him, wouldn’t lie to him. Even if he was a spy, even if he was really Hissrad. There had to be some camaraderie in all this snewfound peace, right?
“There is nothing amiss,” the Bull said after a moment. “Only difference is the language used to speak of the union, but that is simply because Qunlat has no concept for marriage.”
“Good, then,” the Archon said, pressing his hands together. “Shall we begin?”
The ceremony was much less theatrical than what was traditional in Tevinter, but Dorian guessed it was to be expected when merging both their cultures together into something that made some sort of sense. The Bull gave him one half of a dragon’s tooth and he settled it over his throat as a necklace, as he did the same with his own. It was a show of closeness, not marriage, but it was as close to a wedding ring as they were getting. Not that any they could buy in Minrathous would fit around the Bull’s fingers.
“I believe that is done, then,” the Arishok said after a long pause. His brow was furrowed, lip curled, clearly unfamilira with such practices. There was no romance nor family in the Qun, as far as Dorian knew. “Stand still so the painter can work, Hissrad, Pavus.”
“Of course,” Dorian said.
He’d only gotten a portrait once, when he was barely fourteen, before his inclinations were obvious, before his father picked up on them and acted accordingly, but at least he had a sketch from a dear friend. The thought made bitterness pool low in his belly and he forced himself to give a placid smile as he leaned against Bull, his head making contact with his shoulder.
The painter worked with quick, fast brush strokes. Dorian stood as still as he could for what felt like eons, the warmth of the Bull’s body spreading over to his own. After a while, the painter looked up from his seat and gave a thumbs-up.
“Sketch is done. Thank you.”
“Our pleasure,” the Bull said, voice rough around the edges, his hand going up to clasp over the dragon tooth, fingers rubbing over the smooth texture. After a moment, he turned to Dorian. “I have a place downtown. We’ll live there, at least for a while.”
Dorian nodded and took his hand in his, feeling the Archon’s heavy gaze on the back of his neck as they left the office. Everyone knew they weren’t marrying for any reason other than politics, but it was still better to pretend. For the optics of peace, for the possibility of an Altus mage and a Qunari being able to coexist and even like each other.
And if it made Dorian’s face flush as the Bull’s thumb brushed over the back of his hand, well, that was his problem to deal with.
The apartment was a small thing not quite meant for two people. Dorian had never lived in such a tight space before, even in his years in Nevarra and the Minrathous Circle of Magi—there was always space to breathe in, at least, and here it felt like only the bedroom had any sort of space.
Dorian set down his suitcase by the entryway and headed into the kitchen, looking through the sparse food in the cabinets and ice box, considering what to eat before grabbing some bread and ham for a simple sandwich. He wasn’t much hungry, what laid ahead of them making his guts twist with nerves.
He didn’t know how to do this part. He knew his way around sex, sure, had plenty of experience when it came to pressing his body against another man’s, but sharing a space with a man he was going to be intimate with befuddled him. At most he knew how to share a classroom or an office, but not a life.
The Bull stepped into the kitchen while he ate and it was small enough to feel cramped with the two of them inside, not helped at all by the Bull’s size. He had shed the suit he was wearing to the ceremony, showing now his bare torso with only a harness over his shoulder. Dorian averted his gaze, shame creeping up his spine at the way he wished to admire him.
He was his husband, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking of his father’s voice, calling him an invert, that he needed to be fixed if he wished to be a good heir. He’d almost gone along with it, too. He was sure they would’ve found some other Altus mage to marry a Qunari.
“You’re thinking too hard, Dorian,” the Bull said as he made himself a fruit salad. “Relax.”
Dorian forced out a laugh. “Just thinking about the logistics, Bull. Is the bed big enough for the two of us? Or will I have to buy a new mattress tomorrow?”
The Bull cocked a grin at him, his eye glinting. “And lug it back here all on your lonesome?”
“That’s what I’ve got you for, don’t I? A big Qunari husband, for all the hard manual labor life requires.”
The Bull laughed at that, boisterous and loud, and it made Dorian relax, letting his shoulders untense as he finished eating. He went to wash the dishes—as much as he had never washed them in his life, it couldn’t be hard—and then went to their room.
The bed was indeed a bit small for a Qunari and a human, but they were going to be fine, probably. He peeled off his clothes until he was only in his smalls and pulled the sheets back to get into bed. It was comfortable, though perhaps less plush than the mattress he was used to back home. He guessed this was a small humbling, this marriage, finding himself in something near the average person’s living conditions.
The Bull came by a few moments later and pulled off his boots and pants, leaving him only in his smalls and a metal brace over his knee. Dorian watched him through the low light of the candle he had lit by his nightstand; he had a broad frame and a warrior’s physique, with battle scars littering his torso. He stretched a little before his hand reached up to his eyepatch; for a moment he nearly pulled it off, before his eye flickered over to Dorian and he kept it on.
“I don’t mind if you don’t have an eye, Bull,” he said, voice a bit muffled by the pillow.
The Bull scoffed. “I am not in the habit of taking it out. It’s fine.”
He settled down into bed, his horns nearly pressing against Dorian’s face as he laid on his back.
Dorian watched him. The position was a little awkward. After a few moments, he pulled his pillow down to settle beneath him so there was no chance the horns would poke his eye out while he slept. He curled up in on himself and let himself press closer to Bull, until his hand was brushing against his side.
“You want to cuddle, Pavus?” the Bull asked, voice charged with sleep.
“I’m considering it,” he replied. He straightened up to blow the candle out and they were submerged in darkness, the barest glint of moonlight slipping through the curtains. He got back to his position, his face by Bull’s chest.
He resisted the urge to curl up against him, to wrap his arm around him. Even though it would hardly make its way through his torso. The thought made desire pool low in his belly and he shook the image away, as much as he liked this, as much as he loved having someone so much bigger than him press against him.
Before he could let himself follow his whims, the Bull was doing so, his big hand pressing against Dorian’s hip. He made a little noise, a choked out gasp, and looked up at him.
“Is that alright?” the Bull asked. “Better get used to married life, Pavus.”
Dorian laughed. “It’s fine,” he said, and scooted just slightly closer, his face against the Bull’s chest. He was so warm. “Good night, Bull.”
“Good night, Dorian.”
Dorian woke up to the sunlight streaming through the curtains and his face smooshed against the Bull’s pec as one heavy hand laid right over his hip, not quite gripping.
He groaned softly and blinked the sleep away, squirming to get away as the Bull woke up too, pulling his hand back. Dorian straightened up and stretched, the joints in his arms lightly complaining and cracking before he turned towards the Bull.
His eyepatch was slightly off-center, revealing just a bit of the scarring underneath. His horns were pressed right onto the headboard and he slowly straightened, the points catching on the wood and making a horrid screeching sound, like nails on a chalkboard, before he pulled away.
“Good morning,” he said, fixing up his eyepatch. “You slept well? Or are the sheets’ thread count not high enough for you?”
Dorian laughed at that. “I lived in the students quarters in the Grand Necropolis for a while, they were worse,” he said easily as he looked for his clothes, sliding on a vest followed by robes that settled by his ankles.
He walked into the kitchen, the Bull close behind him, and he looked through the cupboards until he found something to his taste. Beside him, the Bull was boiling water in a kettle and pulling out a cup out of a cupboard, along with a paper filter.
Dorian stared for a moment, distracted from his task of making himself a breakfast of bread, scrambled eggs and some fruit. They were lacking in some areas—there was no fish in the icebox!—but he guessed he could make do, or go out to the markets in the afternoon.
“I didn’t take the Qun as coffee lovers,” Dorian piped up as the Bull carefully settled coffee into the filter.
The Bull raised a brow and turned to face him. “You want some? It’s not really a thing here, but I tried it in Antiva.”
“Well traveled, huh?” he drawled. “I thought you were away only for a year.”
“Lots you can do in a year,” he replied evenly. “Coffee?” he repeated.
Dorian turned back to the eggs he was cracking over a ceramic pan and hummed. “Alright.”
He was glad for Nevarra, in moments like these, in how he had to figure out how to cook for himself when sent away from Tevinter and the Circle of Magi—otherwise, he would have been a bumbling fool in front of the Bull. And he still had some pride left, dammit, even after all that had happened, even after his father went from trying to fix him to marrying him off to a man.
After enough work in the kitchen, they settled in the small table in its corner with two steaming cups of coffee, scrambled eggs, ham and cheese for the both of them and some fruit to eat after the savory section of breakfast was over.
“So what were you doing in that year?” Dorian asked.
“Spying,” the Bull said as he dipped his toast into the scrambled eggs. “Working as a mercenary. I was working on getting my own band when I was called back to Par Vollen.”
“Sorry,” Dorian said, but he wasn’t, not particularly. “And what’d you learn about humans with all your spying and killing? Nothing good, I bet.”
The Bull snorted. “There’s good and bad everywhere,” he said. He looked to the side, like he wasn’t quite sure if he was allowed to say that, not when Par Vollen was included in said everywhere. He took a bite of his toast. “What about you? What were you doing in Nevarra?”
He doubted for a moment and turned back to his food, his stomach twisting. He hated that he did want to talk about himself with the Bull, when it was all going to go back to his people, when it was all some sort of ploy. He tried to ignore the genuine interest in the Bull’s eye, the way he tilted his head, the way he smiled at him. If he didn’t see it, then this was all still a bitter plan to stop having perfectly capable workers killed in the jungle, and not something that could be almost… good.
“Studying,” he replied curtly.
The Bull just smiled wider, shook his head and continued eating. Perhaps that was even worse.
He sucked in a breath, considered this, and then said, “I excelled in necromancy in the Circle, but they lacked the proper teachers for it, so it was suggested I went to the Grand Necropolis to continue my studies. I spent two years there.”
There was nothing too personal, too terrible there. It was just facts that anyone could find out about if they asked around in Minrathous. It was fine to tell this.
It should be fine to tell other things, too, but it was like showing his entrails to a man he still couldn’t help but read as the enemy.
The rest of the day was almost normal, beyond everything in Dorian’s life being different. The Bull suggested he could go buy groceries and Dorian gave him a long list of things he wished for before he left for the market stalls. So Dorian stayed at their home, rearranging furniture and putting up the few mementos from home he had taken there—a sketch of himself Felix had drawn years ago, a leather-bound book about Tevinter birds completed with rough drawings of them, and a small emblem featuring the Pavus coat of arms. He propped Felix’s sketch up on a frame with a leg on the nightstand, put the book into a near-empty bookshelf and nailed the emblem to the drawing room’s back wall.
The Bull returned with a great deal of things, carrying them in various bags with no struggle whatsoever. Dorian hated how the simplest show of strength—the Bull’s hands settled around bags filled to the brim with vegetables, fruit, nuts, meat, rice and potatoes, the muscles in his arms only barely tense—was so attractive to him. He wondered, briefly, if the Maker had heard his pleas for a strong warrior to pick him up and carry him away from Tevinter and had twisted the desire into this situation he was in.
“Let me help you with that,” he said, grabbing some of the bags. He hissed under his breath at the weight of them and groaned before he brought them over to the kitchen.
The Bull snickered behind him. “I could handle them myself, Dorian,” he said.
“I’m sure you could, but I don’t like being useless.” He started to take things out of the bags haphazardly, putting some in the cupboards and the icebox while others laid on the counter to be made into dinner for the two of them.
“What are you going to do?”
Dorian hummed as he took out salmon out of the bag, settling it over a cutting board and taking a knife out to skin it and then cut it. “Smoked salmon with baked potatoes with a salad on the side. Lettuce, tomatoes, a splash of vinegar.”
“You vints do really like fish.”
“Have to take advantage of all the coast,” he replied evenly. The Bull was working beside him, too, filling up the cupboards with the various things he’d bought—there was even some flour, which he didn’t really know what he planned to do with. “Flour? Do you know how to bake?”
The Bull’s quick motions through the groceries paused for a moment. “Some things,” he said. “I can make bread, maybe cookies if I look at a recipe book.”
Dorian blinked for a moment, and then smiled. “You’re full of surprises, Bull.”
The Bull snorted. “I try.” He continued and watched as Dorian worked on cutting up the fish. “You learn to cook in Nevarra? I can’t see you doing it at home.”
Dorian snorted. “Yeah. Mostly there.”
“Glad for it, then.” He finished up with the last bag and stretched his arms a little. Dorian only stole a glance of how his muscles tensed and then relaxed before he looked back at what he was doing, the knife singing dangerously close to his skin. “Call me up for dinner. I’ll be reading and writing some letters.”
The Bull joined Dorian for dinner in the dining table. The table was set, not as ornately as he was used to, but good enough for him—a prettily embroidered tablecloth, fine dishware, silver utensils, with candles and a small flower vase in the middle between them. The table was small, only meant for four people, which meant it didn’t feel so empty when it was just the two of them.
The silence was… companionable. The scrap of knives on porcelain, setting a spoon down after a helping of salad, a mumbling compliment to the food that made his belly warm, happy to have been good at this, if anything. He ate and looked at the Bull as he did so as well, focusing on the tiny details of his hands dealing with utensils that looked minuscule in comparison to him. Maker, but he was attractive. Why had he lost his instincts of seduction with his husband? Was he just a contrarian, and knowing that this was what was expected of him made him unable to take the next steep? But even if it was expected, the Bull was too attractive, too smart, too strong for him to ignore. They could very well be roommates with matching necklaces, and that wouldn’t do.
As they finished eating, Dorian worked up the courage to stand and follow the Bull as he started to gather the dirty dishes.
“Bull,” he started, trying to hide his nerves. Maker, he was not some sort of blushing virgin, he had done this a myriad times! But he wasn’t supposed to see the man afterward, to share a bed, to be with him. And so it was terrifying in a new way. But he had to push forward. At least then he’d get something nice in return for his efforts.
“Yes?” he turned to him, one hand holding the plates and salad bowls, with the utensils inside.
“I’m going to kiss you. Any arguments?”
The Bull tilted his head. “Let me put the dishes in the sink first.”
Dorian watched, impatiently, as he settled the dishes in the sink and then turned to face him, stepping closer to him and looking down at him enough to make his guts twist with want.
“So I heard something about a kiss,” the Bull teased.
“Shut up,” Dorian bit out before he got on his tiptoes and pulled him down for a kiss, pressing his lips against his. The Bull gasped before he relaxed and reached a hand to settle on the small of Dorian’s back, deepening the kiss as he opened his mouth.
Dorian’s eyes fluttered shut and he let out a content sigh as he licked into the Bull’s mouth, his tongue pressing right against his own. It was perfect, to feel his hands around him, to feel small and fragile in every way he could. With him. His husband.
Maybe there was a silver lining to this, to being with a man for longer than one night. To banter and bicker and eat together, to find common ground. That’d mean there were many, many more kisses like this in his future.
He gasped for air once the Bull pulled away, one hand on his hip and the other sliding up his back, sending shivers down his spine.
“You’ve been chomping at the bit to do that, haven’t you?” the Bull said.
Dorian scoffed. “You’re the one who opened his mouth first,” he said before he kissed him again.
Yes, maybe there was a good part to all this—having a hot Qunari husband he found himself getting along with was better than anything else in his life, anyway. The peace between their countries was just a bonus.