[Fanfiction] Practical Considerations, Dragon Age: Origins, Alistair/Cousland
Title: Practical Considerations
Fandom: Dragon Age: Origins
Characters: Female Cousland (Siobhan), Alistair
Pairing(s): Cousland/Alistair
Rating/Warnings: PG-13 for mentions of war and sexual dialogue.
Summary: The aftermath of the consummation of certain things that have been building between Alistair and the Warden.. This is really just pure self-indulgent fluff. But the stars told me to post my Dragon Age fic, okay?
Practical Considerations
“So,” Siobhan asked, and the callused fingers (as rough and battle-worn as her own probably were, she reflected, though how would she know? You couldn’t feel your own fingers-well, maybe you could, but that would be rather strange, wouldn’t it?) currently tracing the line of her neck over her ear, running through her hair, paused, the palm dropping quickly, nervously, against her shoulder. She pushed herself up onto her elbow and turned back toward Alistair, knowing that her smile was probably idiotic and not really caring, “Did your head explode?”
She could see the blush start over Alistair’s collarbone and creep up his neck into his cheeks. Even his ears turned red. “What kind of question is-” he started, then gave a crooked, nervously awkward sort of smile, “I mean, obviously it . . . didn’t. If it had you’d be all splattered in blood and . . . head bits, and . . . so on and so forth. Not very romantic.”
“You’re blushing,” Siobhan pointed out. She was still smiling; she could feel it. She couldn’t seem to help herself. For a moment it felt as if the Blight, the darkspawn horde, her family’s deaths, all of it had disappeared, and there was just the two of them, warm and together. And naked, that helped, too. Kept the mind on the present, and all that. Alistair was . . . good to appreciate, naked. Deserving of attention, certainly.
“Oh, am I?” His blush only deepened. “I suppose that’s why my face feels so hot, then? Thank you for clearing that up. I had no idea. Not . . . very suave, is it? And you probably won’t let me run away until the blushing stops, this time.” He hesitated. “Will you?”
Siobhan caught at his forearms, pulled him back toward her until they both overbalanced and fell back onto her bedroll. His chest was pressed very . . . well, distractingly against her own, and she found herself suddenly very short of breath, even as he laughed and braced his arms on either side of her head. “Are you kidding?” she laughed. “I’m not letting you get away from me now. You missed your chance for a timely escape, I’m afraid. It’s over for you now.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he murmured, and dipped his head to press a kiss to her lips. It was soft, warm, surprisingly tentative considering what they’d just done, and he pulled away after only a moment. “But it was really . . .” he stopped, blew his breath out, and closed his eyes. “It was really . . . all right? You weren’t . . . I mean. Um. Dis . . . appointed or . . . anything?”
Siobhan bit her lip against a laugh and lifted her arms to wrap them around his neck. His skin was sweaty and a little damp, and his hair tickled against the backs of her arms. “Did I seem like I was disappointed, Alistair? Really?” she said. “At all? At any point?”
He flushed. Again. “We-eeell, no,” he said. “But . . . you could have been! I could have been terrible. Awful. Oncoming darkspawn horde would be preferable, and that sort of thing!” He laughed, and it sounded anxious to Siobhan’s ears, especially considering the way his eyes slid away from hers. “You know. What with all those . . . uh, um. Other lampposts and . . . so on. Oh, Maker. Did I just say that? Out loud? I did? You don’t say.”
She couldn’t help it this time; the laugh escaped her before she could push it back. “I have to admit, I exaggerated all that . . . just a bit. Maybe. It was mostly to make you blush, I admit it. Didn’t I say you’re cute when you’re bashful? Well, it’s true.”
“Oh, blessed Andraste,” he muttered. “Don’t say that, not now. Not-I mean-cute? Really?”
“You prefer devastatingly handsome?”
“Yes!” he practically yelped. “Quite a lot, actually! Can we just . . . go with that from now on, maybe? I’m not a-a tiny, defenseless kitten or something. I’m a grown man, and now I’m your . . . lover.”
“Cute and devastatingly handsome,” Siobhan said, “I’m a lucky woman.” And she was, she thought, for a given value of luck. Surviving the massacre of her family by becoming a Grey Warden, surviving the Joining, surviving Ostagar, finding someone like Alistair in her new order first as a friend, and now, as he’d said, lover. She was lucky.
“Hey, stop stealing my lines,” Alistair said. He smiled, and it was the smile that made her heart stop almost painfully in her chest rather than the shy smile, or the silly one, or the teasing one, or the silly teasing one. He brushed her hair back from her face with the fingers of one hand. “I’m the lucky one; I thought we’d talked about that already.” His touch was gentle enough to make her cheeks warm.
“Now you’re just stealing mine,” Siobhan pointed out. She was still smiling, she realized. She wondered if it would start making her cheeks hurt, soon. She hadn’t smiled this much since . . . well, since before . . . everything had happened, not all at once. Even if Alistair could always seem to get her to smile. It was a new feeling. She liked it. She’d used to smile all the time, she remembered that, even if it felt far away and almost foreign to her now. It was nice to feel it again, like reminding herself who she was. Or who she had been. It was hard to say, now.
“Steal? From you, dear lady?” he was grinning himself, now. “Never, I swear it.”
“Uh-huh.” Siobhan arranged her features into a mock-scowl. “So where did that cheese I bought in Redcliffe go, then? I don’t think Dane ate it. Red meat off the bone is more his style.”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that!” Alistair burst out, laughing. “It makes you look like you’re trying to be Morrigan or something, and I just-no, just-no, stop, stop! I admit it! I ate it! It was there, tempting me, smelling delicious, you can’t honestly have expected me to resist!”
“I knew it, you dirty, dirty thief!” Siobhan bit the inside of her cheek against a laugh, trying to force her features to remain serious. “Stealing a woman’s cheese is a serious matter. I should punish you for that.”
“Um, you-you should?”
“Yes,” she said gravely. “Definitely. Discipline in the camp and all of it.”
“Yes, I’ve been a bad, bad man,” he agreed in a sober tone.
“Hmm.” Siobhan pretended to ponder the matter, then grabbed Alistair roughly by the back of the head and pulled him down into a kiss; this one intense, passionate, more demanding than the last. Alistair gasped a bit, and then he was kissing her back just as hotly, and they fell back even further onto her extremely flat pillow as his arms went around her. She tightened her hand in his hair and pulled him closer. By the time she pulled away, they were both gasping for air, but Alistair took just a moment to suck in a short breath before he was kissing her again, more eagerly and hungrily than he had earlier, warm and wet and-well. She didn’t have any complaints about his performance in that area, that was for certain. “You’ll find some way to make it up to me, I’m sure,” she finally managed when he pulled away, just a bit, still close enough that his breath tingled over her lips. She sounded rather breathless, even to her own ears.
“Mm,” he said, and forced his eyes open again, pulling back. “Yes, I think I might be able to manage that.”
“You’re a clever sort,” she said in her airiest tone, “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
“Clever?” he smiled. “You flatter me, you minx. I’ll get too full of myself, just watch, start having delusions of grandeur, take over the group, terrible things might happen, I warned you, remember-don’t say I didn’t, now.”
“I’ll risk it,” Siobhan said, smiling herself. “Besides, I think you’d be able to handle it.”
“Ohhh, don’t say that,” Alistair said quickly.
“I stand by my argument,” she said, laughing, “you’re a clever man; you’ll come up with something.”
“I’ll focus my efforts on the task, I assure you,” he said. “You’ll see how clever I can be. Ahahaha.”
“That was a rather evil-sounding laugh, Alistair,” Siobhan said in her sternest tone.
“I do my best!” he said. He blew his breath out, looked away again. “So, then, you hadn’t-much-before now, I mean-”
“I had,” Siobhan said, feeling her own cheeks heat. Lampposts, then? Were they back to this topic again? Had it been too much to hope that he’d simply forget about it? “But it wasn’t serious, or anything . . . anything like that. I just . . . well, when I was a bit younger, I didn’t want my brother to be the one with all the stories of . . . charm and conquest of ravishing maids, or-well, ravishing handsome stable lads in my case, I suppose. We were always competitive, the two of us.”
“A-ah,” Alistair said, with another nervous-sounding laugh. “I . . . see. So these . . . handsome stable lads-”
Siobhan sighed. “Alistair,” she said, and reached up to take his face in her hands and turn it back toward her. He let her, and his eyes were uncertain where they focused on her face. “They weren’t serious. None of it was, really. Forget about it. It was . . . a different life.” She sighed, had to close her eyes for a moment. How true that was. “Now my life is with the Grey Wardens. I might be the teyrna of Highever now-if Fergus is . . . well.” She swallowed and made herself say it. “Dead. But that hardly matters next to everything else.” Alistair was looking at her intently, his eyes focused on her face, but his expression was uncertain, questioning. Siobhan took a deep breath. “What I mean is that my life is here, now-it’s here, and it includes you. And you know, a band of ragtag misfits and a darkspawn horde intent on ending life as we know it, but mostly you.”
Alistair stared at her a moment, his eyes wide, blinked, and swallowed hard, again, then smiled, wide and relieved and very nearly silly, his eyes crinkling up with it, even. “Oh!” he said. “Well, I . . . I suppose that’s . . . that’s good, then. Apart from the darkspawn horde, but . . . yes, good.”
“To answer your earlier question,” Siobhan said, grinning now, “yes, you were. Quite good, in fact. Natural talent, I suppose?”
“You do want to make me blush, I’m onto you now,” he said, flushing slightly even as he said it. “You can’t fool me.”
“All right, I’m guilty,” Siobhan said. “I’ll freely admit to it. And what’s so wrong with that, I ask you?”
“You’re a bad, evil woman,” he laughed, but slid his arms around her shoulders. “And I love it.”
His arms were so warm against her skin-he was so warm. The feeling of his arms around her-strong and muscular, of course, that was Alistair, always at her back in battle, like her strong right arm, and how strange, that she would need one, but she wouldn’t have had anyone else standing there, not for anything-was still unfamiliar and almost . . . surprising. This-closeness, warmth, all of it, was something she thought she might not ever have really, not again. After all, Grey Wardens weren’t exactly known for getting married and settling down. Before . . . everything had happened, she’d always assumed she’d be married, eventually, if not to Thomas Howe (she’d always liked his brother better, to be honest) than to one of the other children of her father’s banns, or maybe even some Marcher noble. But after Howe had murdered her family . . . all that had been over. Forever, she had thought. This was something . . . altogether different from what she’d ever expected. And not bad, not at all. Even better than whatever she’d expected, she thought, to be totally honest with herself. Alistair was . . . her friend, her closest friend, her brother-in-arms, not a husband she hardly knew. And she . . . loved him. It was so strange to think about. Good, but . . . strange. Unexpected. Unexpectedly beautiful.
“Now who’s the flatterer?” Siobhan asked.
Alistair just laughed and kissed her again. Siobhan smiled into the kiss, reached up to brush her hand along his cheek before clasping her hand at the back of his neck. She pushed up with her other elbow to roll them onto their sides, still kissing.
“Ah,” Alistair gasped when he pulled away. “Mmm. Is it bad that I feel like I could do that forever?”
“Not in my opinion,” Siobhan said. “Though I suppose that might get in the way of defeating the Blight, and all that. Pity, really. But that’s duty for you.”
Alistair sighed and brushed a lock of hair off her cheek. “Yes, I suppose,” he said, mock-unwillingly. “Those pesky darkspawn, not letting us have our fun.”
“Aren’t they?” Siobhan said. “Curse them, anyway. They really are evil.”
“Yes! Getting in the way of our love like that,” Alistair laughed. “It should be a crime. Not that they’d probably care if it were . . . .” He grinned, then kissed her cheek, along the curve of her jaw, her neck, leaving his lips lingering there as he blew his breath out and closed his eyes. Siobhan could feel warmth creeping up her skin where his lips touched.
“Now who’s blushing?” he murmured against her skin, which only made the warmth deepen.
“That would be me,” Siobhan admitted. “And it’s all your fault.” She tangled her hand in his hair again-it was so short, it tickled and scratched under her fingers. She couldn’t get enough of the feeling of it against her hands.
Alistair trailed his lips down to her shoulder. “How can your skin be so soft, when you wear so much armor all the time?” he mumbled. “And you smell so good. How can you still smell so good?”
Siobhan had to laugh. “Alistair, I don’t,” she said. “I’m covered in sweat and disgusting, I’m sure. It took me nearly an hour to wash the blood off earlier today.”
“Well, you don’t smell disgusting now,” Alistair said, and pressed a kiss to her collarbone. “You smell beautiful.”
“You are a flatterer,” Siobhan said, smiling fondly. “You’re being ridiculous. Mind you, I’m glad you’re not put off by the sweat and blood and all the rest of it. My being a warrior and a Grey Warden and all that, even after the Blight is stopped I doubt that will be going anywhere.”
“You’d be beautiful anywhere, even in the middle of a battlefield,” Alistair said, raising his head to look at her. His tone was almost worshipful, and it made Siobhan flush even more hotly.
“Now I know you’re in love!” Siobhan smiled at him.
“Nothing wrong with being in love,” Alistair said. He hesitated. “Is there?”
“No, of course not!” Siobhan said quickly, feeling her cheeks warm even further. It felt ridiculously hard to say those words herself, suddenly, for all her flirting and cheerfully disclosed experience. Not that she didn’t want to. Not that she didn’t love him. It wasn’t . . . wasn’t that at all.
The last man she’d had congress with had ended up dead right in front of her. The last people she’d said those words to had been her parents. Right-right before-
She looked away. For a moment she could see her father’s face, strained and twisted in agony and dark with the stains of his own blood. She didn’t want to think about that right now, even if-I’m sorry, Father, she thought. But you would have liked him; I know you would have. Mother might have complained, though she would have come around in the end. But I know you’d have liked him.
“Mm, well, I’ll take you at your word, then,” Alistair said with a smile, drawing her attention back to him easily-his smile warm and humorous, inviting her, asking her, to focus on him, not the darkness of the past, even the darkness of the past they shared. He’d lost everything, too, and he still smiled. The least she could do was match that resilience, that indomitability, wasn’t it? Of course it was.
“You should,” Siobhan told him, pressing her own lips to his shoulder, his neck, feeling the shiver and twitch of muscle under her touch. She could smell the sweat and musk of his own body, and she supposed he did have a point-she didn’t mind herself. She was so used to the scent of death and blood and steel, the smell of Alistair’s warm human sweat was a pleasant one. “It is my word of knightly honor, after all.”
“Should I?” Alistair said absently, then sighed as her mouth shifted down over his chest. “Oh, that’s . . . that’s very distracting,” he said, even as she brought her lips back up over his neck.
“Is it?” Siobhan smiled. She loosened her hand from his hair, laid both of them against his waist. “Should I stop distracting you?”
He groaned. “You tease. I can see how this is going to be. I had no idea what I was getting myself into with you. How I weep for my lost innocence.”
“Regretting it already?” Siobhan teased. She drew her hands up over his back, curled them over his shoulders.
“Never,” he swore, and the fierce seriousness of his tone surprised her. A moment passed, and he looked a bit sheepish.
“Never,” Siobhan agreed before he could speak in embarrassment, letting her own conviction color her words. “I promise you that, Alistair.”
“Oh, really? Aww,” he said, but he looked deeply, endearingly pleased by that, the color rising in his cheeks again as he looked away almost shyly. It really was ridiculous, the acrobatics simply watching him induced her heart to perform. And even ridiculous as it was, she couldn’t seem to bring herself to care. “I . . . really am a lucky man, then,” he murmured.
“Mm,” Siobhan agreed, tilting her head up to press their lips together again. Alistair sighed into the kiss, letting his eyes slide closed as she slipped her tongue into his mouth, his arm coming up to curl around her shoulders again as he slanted his head further into the kiss. His tongue twined against hers, wet but somehow soft, but the kiss stayed slow, almost careful. Siobhan found herself pressing closer to him in order to get a better angle, curling her arm around his back. Alistair opened his mouth further beneath hers, and Siobhan eagerly deepened the kiss still further, using her knee against the bedroll to give her the leverage to push Alistair down onto his back. She rolled over on top of him and pulled away to look down at him. She could feel that same smile sliding back onto her face.
Alistair blew his breath out unevenly, and his eyes blinked back open. “I . . . uh, wow,” he said in an unsteady rasp of a voice. “Keep kissing me like that and I . . . I don’t know what I’ll do. Forget what we’re even doing here, probably. That . . . that wouldn’t be a good thing, would it? Right?”
“We were doing something?” Siobhan asked, laughing. “You mean, we didn’t just come to set up camp all the way out here for the time to ourselves?”
Alistair sighed. “Sadly, no,” he said. “Though if I were to have met you some other way, my dear, the notion would be tempting indeed.”
“It isn’t now?” Siobhan teased. “Ah, it is true what they say, familiarity breeds contempt.”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” Alistair replied. “Don’t put words in my mouth, woman.”
“I’ll put something else there, if you don’t mind,” Siobhan said, and grinned as Alistair’s eyes widened.
“I had no idea you had this-evil side to you,” he said. “Where were you hiding it all this time?”
“Under the armor, I expect,” Siobhan said playfully. She was almost surprised by how lighthearted her mood had grown just over the past few hours. “It covers a multitude of sins.”
“Oh, does it now,” Alistair said.
“Especially the plate,” she replied in her most serious tone.
“I’ll have to keep that in mind.” Alistair smiled. A moment passed, as he gazed up at her. “So,” he said.
“Yes?” Siobhan replied.
“I keep getting . . . ah, distracted,” Alistair said. “Should we . . . ah, I don’t know. Shouldn’t we be-”
“We are in camp,” Siobhan reminded him. “There’s nothing particularly pressing that needs doing. Not tonight, at any rate. Is there?”
“Ah, no. No, there isn’t,” Alistair agreed quickly. “So then . . . it’s all right if I stay here? Share your tent and all that? You wouldn’t mind?”
“More than all right,” Siobhan assured him. “I’d love it.” She gestured around them. “It’s no palace or anything, but feel free to move in. Such as it is.”
Alistair smiled at that. “Then I will,” he said. “It’s not like my tent is any bigger, and . . . well, I’d love to.”
“Then it’s decided,” Siobhan said. “Begging the question of what we’re going to do with your tent. Hmm,” she pretended to consider, “sell it to Bodahn?”
“You wouldn’t-” Alistair started, then shook his head, smiling. “You almost got me that time.”
“Only almost?” Siobhan asked, raising her eyebrows.
Alistair just took her face in his hands and kissed her again, and Siobhan closed her eyes and kissed him back.
There would be time enough to think on practical considerations, after all.
Fin.
Fandom: Dragon Age: Origins
Characters: Female Cousland (Siobhan), Alistair
Pairing(s): Cousland/Alistair
Rating/Warnings: PG-13 for mentions of war and sexual dialogue.
Summary: The aftermath of the consummation of certain things that have been building between Alistair and the Warden.. This is really just pure self-indulgent fluff. But the stars told me to post my Dragon Age fic, okay?
Practical Considerations
“So,” Siobhan asked, and the callused fingers (as rough and battle-worn as her own probably were, she reflected, though how would she know? You couldn’t feel your own fingers-well, maybe you could, but that would be rather strange, wouldn’t it?) currently tracing the line of her neck over her ear, running through her hair, paused, the palm dropping quickly, nervously, against her shoulder. She pushed herself up onto her elbow and turned back toward Alistair, knowing that her smile was probably idiotic and not really caring, “Did your head explode?”
She could see the blush start over Alistair’s collarbone and creep up his neck into his cheeks. Even his ears turned red. “What kind of question is-” he started, then gave a crooked, nervously awkward sort of smile, “I mean, obviously it . . . didn’t. If it had you’d be all splattered in blood and . . . head bits, and . . . so on and so forth. Not very romantic.”
“You’re blushing,” Siobhan pointed out. She was still smiling; she could feel it. She couldn’t seem to help herself. For a moment it felt as if the Blight, the darkspawn horde, her family’s deaths, all of it had disappeared, and there was just the two of them, warm and together. And naked, that helped, too. Kept the mind on the present, and all that. Alistair was . . . good to appreciate, naked. Deserving of attention, certainly.
“Oh, am I?” His blush only deepened. “I suppose that’s why my face feels so hot, then? Thank you for clearing that up. I had no idea. Not . . . very suave, is it? And you probably won’t let me run away until the blushing stops, this time.” He hesitated. “Will you?”
Siobhan caught at his forearms, pulled him back toward her until they both overbalanced and fell back onto her bedroll. His chest was pressed very . . . well, distractingly against her own, and she found herself suddenly very short of breath, even as he laughed and braced his arms on either side of her head. “Are you kidding?” she laughed. “I’m not letting you get away from me now. You missed your chance for a timely escape, I’m afraid. It’s over for you now.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he murmured, and dipped his head to press a kiss to her lips. It was soft, warm, surprisingly tentative considering what they’d just done, and he pulled away after only a moment. “But it was really . . .” he stopped, blew his breath out, and closed his eyes. “It was really . . . all right? You weren’t . . . I mean. Um. Dis . . . appointed or . . . anything?”
Siobhan bit her lip against a laugh and lifted her arms to wrap them around his neck. His skin was sweaty and a little damp, and his hair tickled against the backs of her arms. “Did I seem like I was disappointed, Alistair? Really?” she said. “At all? At any point?”
He flushed. Again. “We-eeell, no,” he said. “But . . . you could have been! I could have been terrible. Awful. Oncoming darkspawn horde would be preferable, and that sort of thing!” He laughed, and it sounded anxious to Siobhan’s ears, especially considering the way his eyes slid away from hers. “You know. What with all those . . . uh, um. Other lampposts and . . . so on. Oh, Maker. Did I just say that? Out loud? I did? You don’t say.”
She couldn’t help it this time; the laugh escaped her before she could push it back. “I have to admit, I exaggerated all that . . . just a bit. Maybe. It was mostly to make you blush, I admit it. Didn’t I say you’re cute when you’re bashful? Well, it’s true.”
“Oh, blessed Andraste,” he muttered. “Don’t say that, not now. Not-I mean-cute? Really?”
“You prefer devastatingly handsome?”
“Yes!” he practically yelped. “Quite a lot, actually! Can we just . . . go with that from now on, maybe? I’m not a-a tiny, defenseless kitten or something. I’m a grown man, and now I’m your . . . lover.”
“Cute and devastatingly handsome,” Siobhan said, “I’m a lucky woman.” And she was, she thought, for a given value of luck. Surviving the massacre of her family by becoming a Grey Warden, surviving the Joining, surviving Ostagar, finding someone like Alistair in her new order first as a friend, and now, as he’d said, lover. She was lucky.
“Hey, stop stealing my lines,” Alistair said. He smiled, and it was the smile that made her heart stop almost painfully in her chest rather than the shy smile, or the silly one, or the teasing one, or the silly teasing one. He brushed her hair back from her face with the fingers of one hand. “I’m the lucky one; I thought we’d talked about that already.” His touch was gentle enough to make her cheeks warm.
“Now you’re just stealing mine,” Siobhan pointed out. She was still smiling, she realized. She wondered if it would start making her cheeks hurt, soon. She hadn’t smiled this much since . . . well, since before . . . everything had happened, not all at once. Even if Alistair could always seem to get her to smile. It was a new feeling. She liked it. She’d used to smile all the time, she remembered that, even if it felt far away and almost foreign to her now. It was nice to feel it again, like reminding herself who she was. Or who she had been. It was hard to say, now.
“Steal? From you, dear lady?” he was grinning himself, now. “Never, I swear it.”
“Uh-huh.” Siobhan arranged her features into a mock-scowl. “So where did that cheese I bought in Redcliffe go, then? I don’t think Dane ate it. Red meat off the bone is more his style.”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that!” Alistair burst out, laughing. “It makes you look like you’re trying to be Morrigan or something, and I just-no, just-no, stop, stop! I admit it! I ate it! It was there, tempting me, smelling delicious, you can’t honestly have expected me to resist!”
“I knew it, you dirty, dirty thief!” Siobhan bit the inside of her cheek against a laugh, trying to force her features to remain serious. “Stealing a woman’s cheese is a serious matter. I should punish you for that.”
“Um, you-you should?”
“Yes,” she said gravely. “Definitely. Discipline in the camp and all of it.”
“Yes, I’ve been a bad, bad man,” he agreed in a sober tone.
“Hmm.” Siobhan pretended to ponder the matter, then grabbed Alistair roughly by the back of the head and pulled him down into a kiss; this one intense, passionate, more demanding than the last. Alistair gasped a bit, and then he was kissing her back just as hotly, and they fell back even further onto her extremely flat pillow as his arms went around her. She tightened her hand in his hair and pulled him closer. By the time she pulled away, they were both gasping for air, but Alistair took just a moment to suck in a short breath before he was kissing her again, more eagerly and hungrily than he had earlier, warm and wet and-well. She didn’t have any complaints about his performance in that area, that was for certain. “You’ll find some way to make it up to me, I’m sure,” she finally managed when he pulled away, just a bit, still close enough that his breath tingled over her lips. She sounded rather breathless, even to her own ears.
“Mm,” he said, and forced his eyes open again, pulling back. “Yes, I think I might be able to manage that.”
“You’re a clever sort,” she said in her airiest tone, “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
“Clever?” he smiled. “You flatter me, you minx. I’ll get too full of myself, just watch, start having delusions of grandeur, take over the group, terrible things might happen, I warned you, remember-don’t say I didn’t, now.”
“I’ll risk it,” Siobhan said, smiling herself. “Besides, I think you’d be able to handle it.”
“Ohhh, don’t say that,” Alistair said quickly.
“I stand by my argument,” she said, laughing, “you’re a clever man; you’ll come up with something.”
“I’ll focus my efforts on the task, I assure you,” he said. “You’ll see how clever I can be. Ahahaha.”
“That was a rather evil-sounding laugh, Alistair,” Siobhan said in her sternest tone.
“I do my best!” he said. He blew his breath out, looked away again. “So, then, you hadn’t-much-before now, I mean-”
“I had,” Siobhan said, feeling her own cheeks heat. Lampposts, then? Were they back to this topic again? Had it been too much to hope that he’d simply forget about it? “But it wasn’t serious, or anything . . . anything like that. I just . . . well, when I was a bit younger, I didn’t want my brother to be the one with all the stories of . . . charm and conquest of ravishing maids, or-well, ravishing handsome stable lads in my case, I suppose. We were always competitive, the two of us.”
“A-ah,” Alistair said, with another nervous-sounding laugh. “I . . . see. So these . . . handsome stable lads-”
Siobhan sighed. “Alistair,” she said, and reached up to take his face in her hands and turn it back toward her. He let her, and his eyes were uncertain where they focused on her face. “They weren’t serious. None of it was, really. Forget about it. It was . . . a different life.” She sighed, had to close her eyes for a moment. How true that was. “Now my life is with the Grey Wardens. I might be the teyrna of Highever now-if Fergus is . . . well.” She swallowed and made herself say it. “Dead. But that hardly matters next to everything else.” Alistair was looking at her intently, his eyes focused on her face, but his expression was uncertain, questioning. Siobhan took a deep breath. “What I mean is that my life is here, now-it’s here, and it includes you. And you know, a band of ragtag misfits and a darkspawn horde intent on ending life as we know it, but mostly you.”
Alistair stared at her a moment, his eyes wide, blinked, and swallowed hard, again, then smiled, wide and relieved and very nearly silly, his eyes crinkling up with it, even. “Oh!” he said. “Well, I . . . I suppose that’s . . . that’s good, then. Apart from the darkspawn horde, but . . . yes, good.”
“To answer your earlier question,” Siobhan said, grinning now, “yes, you were. Quite good, in fact. Natural talent, I suppose?”
“You do want to make me blush, I’m onto you now,” he said, flushing slightly even as he said it. “You can’t fool me.”
“All right, I’m guilty,” Siobhan said. “I’ll freely admit to it. And what’s so wrong with that, I ask you?”
“You’re a bad, evil woman,” he laughed, but slid his arms around her shoulders. “And I love it.”
His arms were so warm against her skin-he was so warm. The feeling of his arms around her-strong and muscular, of course, that was Alistair, always at her back in battle, like her strong right arm, and how strange, that she would need one, but she wouldn’t have had anyone else standing there, not for anything-was still unfamiliar and almost . . . surprising. This-closeness, warmth, all of it, was something she thought she might not ever have really, not again. After all, Grey Wardens weren’t exactly known for getting married and settling down. Before . . . everything had happened, she’d always assumed she’d be married, eventually, if not to Thomas Howe (she’d always liked his brother better, to be honest) than to one of the other children of her father’s banns, or maybe even some Marcher noble. But after Howe had murdered her family . . . all that had been over. Forever, she had thought. This was something . . . altogether different from what she’d ever expected. And not bad, not at all. Even better than whatever she’d expected, she thought, to be totally honest with herself. Alistair was . . . her friend, her closest friend, her brother-in-arms, not a husband she hardly knew. And she . . . loved him. It was so strange to think about. Good, but . . . strange. Unexpected. Unexpectedly beautiful.
“Now who’s the flatterer?” Siobhan asked.
Alistair just laughed and kissed her again. Siobhan smiled into the kiss, reached up to brush her hand along his cheek before clasping her hand at the back of his neck. She pushed up with her other elbow to roll them onto their sides, still kissing.
“Ah,” Alistair gasped when he pulled away. “Mmm. Is it bad that I feel like I could do that forever?”
“Not in my opinion,” Siobhan said. “Though I suppose that might get in the way of defeating the Blight, and all that. Pity, really. But that’s duty for you.”
Alistair sighed and brushed a lock of hair off her cheek. “Yes, I suppose,” he said, mock-unwillingly. “Those pesky darkspawn, not letting us have our fun.”
“Aren’t they?” Siobhan said. “Curse them, anyway. They really are evil.”
“Yes! Getting in the way of our love like that,” Alistair laughed. “It should be a crime. Not that they’d probably care if it were . . . .” He grinned, then kissed her cheek, along the curve of her jaw, her neck, leaving his lips lingering there as he blew his breath out and closed his eyes. Siobhan could feel warmth creeping up her skin where his lips touched.
“Now who’s blushing?” he murmured against her skin, which only made the warmth deepen.
“That would be me,” Siobhan admitted. “And it’s all your fault.” She tangled her hand in his hair again-it was so short, it tickled and scratched under her fingers. She couldn’t get enough of the feeling of it against her hands.
Alistair trailed his lips down to her shoulder. “How can your skin be so soft, when you wear so much armor all the time?” he mumbled. “And you smell so good. How can you still smell so good?”
Siobhan had to laugh. “Alistair, I don’t,” she said. “I’m covered in sweat and disgusting, I’m sure. It took me nearly an hour to wash the blood off earlier today.”
“Well, you don’t smell disgusting now,” Alistair said, and pressed a kiss to her collarbone. “You smell beautiful.”
“You are a flatterer,” Siobhan said, smiling fondly. “You’re being ridiculous. Mind you, I’m glad you’re not put off by the sweat and blood and all the rest of it. My being a warrior and a Grey Warden and all that, even after the Blight is stopped I doubt that will be going anywhere.”
“You’d be beautiful anywhere, even in the middle of a battlefield,” Alistair said, raising his head to look at her. His tone was almost worshipful, and it made Siobhan flush even more hotly.
“Now I know you’re in love!” Siobhan smiled at him.
“Nothing wrong with being in love,” Alistair said. He hesitated. “Is there?”
“No, of course not!” Siobhan said quickly, feeling her cheeks warm even further. It felt ridiculously hard to say those words herself, suddenly, for all her flirting and cheerfully disclosed experience. Not that she didn’t want to. Not that she didn’t love him. It wasn’t . . . wasn’t that at all.
The last man she’d had congress with had ended up dead right in front of her. The last people she’d said those words to had been her parents. Right-right before-
She looked away. For a moment she could see her father’s face, strained and twisted in agony and dark with the stains of his own blood. She didn’t want to think about that right now, even if-I’m sorry, Father, she thought. But you would have liked him; I know you would have. Mother might have complained, though she would have come around in the end. But I know you’d have liked him.
“Mm, well, I’ll take you at your word, then,” Alistair said with a smile, drawing her attention back to him easily-his smile warm and humorous, inviting her, asking her, to focus on him, not the darkness of the past, even the darkness of the past they shared. He’d lost everything, too, and he still smiled. The least she could do was match that resilience, that indomitability, wasn’t it? Of course it was.
“You should,” Siobhan told him, pressing her own lips to his shoulder, his neck, feeling the shiver and twitch of muscle under her touch. She could smell the sweat and musk of his own body, and she supposed he did have a point-she didn’t mind herself. She was so used to the scent of death and blood and steel, the smell of Alistair’s warm human sweat was a pleasant one. “It is my word of knightly honor, after all.”
“Should I?” Alistair said absently, then sighed as her mouth shifted down over his chest. “Oh, that’s . . . that’s very distracting,” he said, even as she brought her lips back up over his neck.
“Is it?” Siobhan smiled. She loosened her hand from his hair, laid both of them against his waist. “Should I stop distracting you?”
He groaned. “You tease. I can see how this is going to be. I had no idea what I was getting myself into with you. How I weep for my lost innocence.”
“Regretting it already?” Siobhan teased. She drew her hands up over his back, curled them over his shoulders.
“Never,” he swore, and the fierce seriousness of his tone surprised her. A moment passed, and he looked a bit sheepish.
“Never,” Siobhan agreed before he could speak in embarrassment, letting her own conviction color her words. “I promise you that, Alistair.”
“Oh, really? Aww,” he said, but he looked deeply, endearingly pleased by that, the color rising in his cheeks again as he looked away almost shyly. It really was ridiculous, the acrobatics simply watching him induced her heart to perform. And even ridiculous as it was, she couldn’t seem to bring herself to care. “I . . . really am a lucky man, then,” he murmured.
“Mm,” Siobhan agreed, tilting her head up to press their lips together again. Alistair sighed into the kiss, letting his eyes slide closed as she slipped her tongue into his mouth, his arm coming up to curl around her shoulders again as he slanted his head further into the kiss. His tongue twined against hers, wet but somehow soft, but the kiss stayed slow, almost careful. Siobhan found herself pressing closer to him in order to get a better angle, curling her arm around his back. Alistair opened his mouth further beneath hers, and Siobhan eagerly deepened the kiss still further, using her knee against the bedroll to give her the leverage to push Alistair down onto his back. She rolled over on top of him and pulled away to look down at him. She could feel that same smile sliding back onto her face.
Alistair blew his breath out unevenly, and his eyes blinked back open. “I . . . uh, wow,” he said in an unsteady rasp of a voice. “Keep kissing me like that and I . . . I don’t know what I’ll do. Forget what we’re even doing here, probably. That . . . that wouldn’t be a good thing, would it? Right?”
“We were doing something?” Siobhan asked, laughing. “You mean, we didn’t just come to set up camp all the way out here for the time to ourselves?”
Alistair sighed. “Sadly, no,” he said. “Though if I were to have met you some other way, my dear, the notion would be tempting indeed.”
“It isn’t now?” Siobhan teased. “Ah, it is true what they say, familiarity breeds contempt.”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” Alistair replied. “Don’t put words in my mouth, woman.”
“I’ll put something else there, if you don’t mind,” Siobhan said, and grinned as Alistair’s eyes widened.
“I had no idea you had this-evil side to you,” he said. “Where were you hiding it all this time?”
“Under the armor, I expect,” Siobhan said playfully. She was almost surprised by how lighthearted her mood had grown just over the past few hours. “It covers a multitude of sins.”
“Oh, does it now,” Alistair said.
“Especially the plate,” she replied in her most serious tone.
“I’ll have to keep that in mind.” Alistair smiled. A moment passed, as he gazed up at her. “So,” he said.
“Yes?” Siobhan replied.
“I keep getting . . . ah, distracted,” Alistair said. “Should we . . . ah, I don’t know. Shouldn’t we be-”
“We are in camp,” Siobhan reminded him. “There’s nothing particularly pressing that needs doing. Not tonight, at any rate. Is there?”
“Ah, no. No, there isn’t,” Alistair agreed quickly. “So then . . . it’s all right if I stay here? Share your tent and all that? You wouldn’t mind?”
“More than all right,” Siobhan assured him. “I’d love it.” She gestured around them. “It’s no palace or anything, but feel free to move in. Such as it is.”
Alistair smiled at that. “Then I will,” he said. “It’s not like my tent is any bigger, and . . . well, I’d love to.”
“Then it’s decided,” Siobhan said. “Begging the question of what we’re going to do with your tent. Hmm,” she pretended to consider, “sell it to Bodahn?”
“You wouldn’t-” Alistair started, then shook his head, smiling. “You almost got me that time.”
“Only almost?” Siobhan asked, raising her eyebrows.
Alistair just took her face in his hands and kissed her again, and Siobhan closed her eyes and kissed him back.
There would be time enough to think on practical considerations, after all.
Fin.