Chapter Text
The first time the Bull has sex with the boss it’s a hard grind against the wall, Lavellan’s shirt open but still on, hands pinned up above his head and creating a delicious stretch out of his slender body. He surprised the Bull-- “A little slower and a lot harder.” --surprised in the best possible way, and then again when the Bull carried him to his bed and he stretched out with a pleased little purr, back arching and golden curls a tangled halo around his head.
“Mm, that was good,” he hummed, smirking up at the Bull with his lovely green eyes twinkling. “I think I’m almost there.”
The Bull chuckled at the sheer cheek and shifted his bulk to crouch over him, drawing another purr from the boss. “Oh, I’m just getting started,” he promised, and Lavellan laughed as he smoothed clever hands over the base of the Bull’s horns.
“I should hope so,” he teased. “You have a reputation to uphold.”
“Brat,” the Bull admonished, amused. Then he shut him up with his hands and his teeth.
He left him, eventually, completely wrung out and glowing with satisfaction, with his reputation fully intact, but the Bull feels he can’t be blamed for not seeing it that first time.
Lavellan surprises him again by seeking him out for another round. The Bull has no illusions of his own appeal out among the basra. The smaller races find him intriguing and exciting, and he’s good at making a night of pleasant memories for them and sending them on their way, but it’s a bit more than most of them are looking for long term, and he isn’t looking for long term, either, so it all works out.
He has his suspicions about the boss, pretty sure he knows what Lavellan needs, but he knows also that the guy is damnably proud. Never again shall we submit , and all that. It can be difficult for guys like that, whether they need it or not.
But instead of shying away, Lavellan settles into his usual place next to the Bull behind the stairs at the Herald’s Rest, angled so that the Bull’s larger body practically hides him from view, sips his tea as he listens to the Bull give him the rundown, accepts the watchword with a regal nod, and invites the Bull back up to his room.
“Done this before, boss?” the Bull asks as he pulls the soft leather ties tighter.
“Mm, once or twice,” Lavellan demures. “So you don’t have to go easy on me.”
“Just let me work….”
The second time he has Lavellan on his front, howling beautifully as he turns his ass cherry red.
Long, wild blond curls cascade down his back and keep most of the mark obscured. The Bull catches a glimpse of stark black lines, but it has always seemed rude to draw attention to someone’s mark while he’s in the middle of fucking them--like he’s accusing them of being unfaithful or something, and the Bull isn’t into that, so he tactfully keeps his eyes averted and avoids that particular stretch of skin as he’s peppering the rest of Lavellan’s back with bites and kisses.
The Bull is slightly distracted, anyway. The boss’s control is impressive, but it always seems like a risk, playing these kinds of games with mages. The point is to get him out of his head, but a mage who loses control for an instant is a feast for demons, or so the Bull understands it anyway.
But Lavellan doesn’t even flicker, not even when the Bull gets him to that place where he floats warm and pliant.
This is the Bull’s favorite part. Lavellan curls into him, soft and sweet and trusting, mewls as the Bull wipes him down and soothes the bruises he pressed into his beautiful bronze skin. He’s as languidly affectionate as a warm cat, and he accepts the Bull’s care with pleased sighs.
“Stay,” he invites drowsily as the Bull gets him all tucked in, pillows fluffed and blankets pulled up to his chin. “At least until I fall asleep.”
“Sure, boss,” the Bull agrees readily, pleased enough to grant him anything. He shifts onto the mattress, moving his bulk gingerly until he’s certain the furniture can hold him. His weight creates a dip in the bedding that Lavellan rolls into with relish until he is curled up against the Bull’s side, draped half over his lap. He wriggles under the Bull’s arm and arches his back until the Bull catches the hint and starts petting him, long, smooth strokes from shoulder to hip.
“Spoiled brat,” the Bull teases, deep voice rumbling with pleasure, and Lavellan hums in perfectly unabashed agreement.
It’s a damned near perfect way to doze off for a few hours.
The sun creeping over the mountains pokes him in the eye at dawn. The Inquisitor’s high tower bedroom is the first to get daybreak in all of Skyhold, and judging from the lack of curtains and the way he keeps his windows thrown open and his bed directly facing east, he doesn’t mind in the least. It’s charming, even though the Bull personally would prefer a bit more sleep.
Lavellan briefly wakes up and smiles sleepily at him when he shifts off the bed, then yawns expansively and rolls over, away from him. The sheets have slipped low in the night and tangle over his hips and legs, and his hair, those beautiful tangles of wild curls, have been caught between his head and the pillow.
And that’s when the Bull sees it at last, stark black and blocky, inked deep into the flesh of his right shoulder blade as if burned there. A qunari soulmark.
Not a name, no names under the qun, just dark, thick lines in a diamond pattern, same as the Bull and countless other active Ben Hassrath have stamped into their reports countless times.
The Bull only realizes he has touched it when Lavellan makes a sleepy noise and twitches lightly. “Don’t worry,” he slurs lightly as he stretches, catlike in the slowly growing puddle of sunlight that continues to spill across his sheets. “It’s inert.”
“...Right,” the Bull says belatedly.
No soulmates under the qun, either.
Lavellan hums again, then sighs and rolls liquidly to his feet, the sheet sliding off him like a caress as he stretches his long, willowy body into a perfect arching bow, shameless and utterly unabashed in his nudity. “I’d invite you to stay for another round, but I have a meeting with Josephine in a few hours that I’d like to be able to sit during,” he says, tossing a wickedly teasing grin over his shoulder. The subject of soulmarks now closed.
Because what else is there to say, really.
“Maybe some other morning?” Lavellan continues, inexplicably inviting the Bull back yet again, and the Bull feels his head tilt into a nod without conscious thought.
He makes sure to keep his expression casual and unconcerned, and it must work because Lavellan’s smile stays warm and affectionate. The Bull automatically answers with a fond smile of his own as the boss steps closer, still distractingly nude, and obligingly bends down when Lavellan stretches up for a last lingering kiss.
“I’ll talk to you later, boss,” he says faintly. “Say hi to Josie for me.”
“Go on,” Lavellan answers with a chuckle, sending him on his way.
The Bull looks back once as he heads down the stairs, and sees Lavellan step onto the balcony to greet the dawn in all his glory (and thank decency the Inquisitor’s balcony is the highest point in Skyhold or else some lucky guardsman on the wall would get a hell of a show). Now that he knows it’s there the soulmark is like a beacon, drawing his eye back helplessly, again and again.
When the soulmark first showed up Hissrad couldn’t do anything about it for a while, out on an assignment for the Ben Hassrath. He told Tallis about it, who seemed exasperated at the inconvenience but just gave him some vitaar to keep it covered and told him to get himself to a Tamassran as soon as he could, pulled him from the assignment early to get it done.
It was embarrassing , mostly. There were no soulmates under the qun; when the marks did show up in any other form than a slightly more acceptable qun mark, it typically meant that person was about to go Vashoth. Hissrad couldn’t think of anything more shameful, and was careful to keep it covered, but he still felt like everyone knew .
His mark was anything but a qun mark, fine elvhen script in glittering gold. Hissrad tried not to look at it, forcibly kept himself from deciphering the foreign letters. He was glad he didn’t speak or read Elvhen and couldn’t recognize the name if he tried, but just from the sheer size of it, clustered over his heart and scrawled across his entire pec, he could tell it was a mouthful, one of those long, rambling elvhen names.
They were Dalish, then, the person on the other end of the mark, whose name was on Hissrad’s chest--he never let himself think the word soulmate because he was qunari and there were no soulmates under the qun, but he had always been good at making observations, just one reason Tama sent him to the Ben Hassrath. The marks show up in the script of a person’s milk tongue, the name they were given at birth inked into the flesh of their… match. Southern city elves rarely even know elvhen, and the elf slaves of Tevinter would leave marks in Tevine. So, whoever they were, they must be Dalish, the elegant flowing script instantly recognizable even if he doesn’t understand a single character.
Dalish and young--the marks tended to show up when the younger of a pair reached their eleventh or twelfth year--ten years in the past for Hissrad, so he’d thought he was past this particular hurdle. Hissrad pictured them sometimes, despite his efforts not to, young and coltish with skinny little limbs, probably, and it struck him as patently absurd that whatever weird, demony Fade power made the marks would pair him up so unevenly.
Really just made it all the more obvious that it was bullshit.
But, bullshit or not, the mark was real, and on the ship back home to get a Tamassran to help him deal with it (get rid of it) he discovered that the connection two linked up people were supposed to share was apparently real as well.
It was nothing so outright terrifying as having some foreigner in his head, reading his thoughts. Harder to pin down than that--more like just an awareness . The young Dalish whose name sat on his chest was… bright. Cheerful, curious. They had a good life, loved and comfortable, happy more often than sad or frightened.
When Hissrad lay in his bunk at the end of the day, rubbing the heel of his palm absently over the gold, foreign letters, he got the impression of sunlight pouring into a green forest clearing, humid warmth and the lazy drone of insects, the laughter of a cool, swift-flowing brook.
He always made himself pull his hand away and turn his thoughts to the qun, but he had to wonder, sometimes, what impression the little elf had of him .
Reaching home was a relief, and Hissrad went to a Tamassran as quickly as he could, bared the mark for her inspection and tried not to feel too shamed that it was there at all. If she was disgusted by him she kept it hidden--of course she did, she was Tamassran, but Hissrad felt grateful all the same.
“Can it be removed?” he couldn’t help but ask.
“Yes,” she said simply. “If that is what you choose.”
He frowned a little. Tamassran were great, but they could be… annoyingly cryptic, even for a Ben Hassrath.
She gave him tea and made him drink.
He did his best not to feel frustrated. He only had to be patient. This… situation wasn’t common, but it had happened before. Tamassran would know what to do and Hissrad only needed to obey. She would remove the mark and he could get back to his job, his life. With any luck it would be like it had never happened at all.
“The qun is a choice,” Tamassran said, and, recognizing a lesson when he heard one, Hissrad straightened his back and did his best to pay attention. “Every day, when you get up in the morning, when you do your duties, when you make your reports and receive your orders, you make the choice against barbarism and chaos, the choice for order, the choice of the qun. There is nothing stopping you from making a different choice. You are not a slave.”
Hissrad frowned. “To leave the qun is to be Vashoth,” he said, and Tamassran nodded and pressed one straight, sturdy finger to the gold, looping script on Hissrad’s chest. On the other end of a link he didn’t want, a bright, coltish, young Dalish elf that he had never met and did not care about shivered with awareness.
“The basra believe that these marks are the brush of fate, but there is no choice in fate. The qun is a choice. Do you understand?”
“I do, Tamassran.”
“What do you choose?”
“Please. Remove it.”
She nodded, warm and approving, and got to her feet, the sway of her wide hips a heated distraction. “Follow me.”
It was a test, obviously. The mark showing up was a sign of something Wrong inside of him, and she had to be sure he was not so far lost that he couldn’t be salvaged. He had no doubt that if he had chosen otherwise, if he had hesitated to do what he should, she would have had him destroyed, as would have been only proper. Only the dangerously insane would try to preserve an infection, after all. Qamek, maybe, to take his misfiring mind and make him useful again while they cleared away the mark.
But he had passed, proved he still had reason enough to know what was right. All would be well, would be as it should. Asit tal-eb.
It burned.
Somewhere far away, at the edge of Hissrad’s awareness, someone young and coltish and bright and cheerful, who reminded Hissrad of warm sunlight and tall trees and cool, laughing streams, who had been protected from pain and fear as a child should be, who he had never met and did not care about, screamed and screamed and screamed.
But eventually the mark faded and took his awareness of that someone with it. There wasn’t even a scar on his chest to show the name had ever been there at all, like it had been erased, wiped clean like chalk from a slate.
It felt like a missing tooth. When Hissrad prodded at the space where it used to sit, shocked that he could feel the loss at all, he got nothing but a numb buzzing. No more sun-drenched green forest clearing. No more cool, laughing stream.
“It… hurt them,” he said to Tamassran, hesitant to say anything at all. But it troubled him. He hadn’t been expecting the screaming, and whoever they were (and he certainly would never know now )… they’d been just a kid.
“Yes,” Tamassran answered simply with a sympathetic tilt to her head. “It is terrible sometimes, what must be done.” She laid a hand on his shoulder and he took comfort from it. “Take heart in this: whoever they are, you have freed them. Instead of the yolk of fate, they now have the gift of choice. In time they may follow the mark you left them and choose the qun, and they will be all the more blessed for it.”
The mark he left them. Shit, he hadn’t even thought of that. Somewhere out in the world was a young Dalish elf whose soulmark had just turned black and dead.
“You think they might end up Viddathari?” he could not help but ask. That would be something at least. Wouldn’t it?
“It is common,” Tamassran said with a shrug. “They are still lost in ignorance and believe the marks to be fate. They come to us like dogs desperate for a leash, and we set them free, make them useful, give them purpose.” Her gaze was steady, solid, grounding. “Whoever they are, they are no concern of yours.”
“Yes, Tamassran. Thank you.”
The Iron Bull has not thought of his lost soulmark in years. Eventually he nearly forgot about the bright, curious, sunny young stranger he’d rejected in favor of a life that was correct and proper within the qun.
When Seheron happened he was certain it was the last straw for him. He turned himself in to the re-educators confident that they would take his mind and remake him like clay, like a broken tool that could be melted down and transformed. Instead they repurposed him and sent him south, the start of a long road that eventually brought the Bull to the Chargers, to the Inquisition, to Inquisitor Micah Lavellan.
There is absolutely no reason to think Lavellan is the erased name that once sat on the Bull’s chest, right over his heart. He’s Dalish, he’s roughly the right age, he’s got a blackened Qun mark on his shoulder, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much.
Among the sprawling, wandering, fractured nation of the Dalish there are doubtless more than a few who receive Qun marks, and among the vast, ordered ranks of the Qunari there had to be at least one other who had to go see a Tamassran about a foreign name etching itself onto their skin in flowing elvhen letters. Nothing but coincidence, no hard evidence. Ben Hassrath draw conclusions, they don’t leap to them from pure conjecture.
He remembers the first time he laid eyes on the boss, on a stinking stretch of Storm Coast with dead raiders all around him. The fight was nothing his boys couldn’t handle, really, but the well-aimed fireball from the top of the ridge had been appreciated all the same.
So, he’d looked up from the charred corpse to see him standing there, the wind tearing through those wild blond curls and the staff in his hand still glowing, and he’d thought, ‘ Not bad .’
“That him?” he’d called to Krem.
“That’s the Herald,” Cremisius confirmed, and the Iron Bull grunted.
“Knows how to make a fucking entrance at least.”
Eventually Lavellan had picked his way down to the shore and let the Bull give him his sales pitch. Cassandra glared balefully and Varrick made quips, all things the Bull has since learned are fairly standard from those two, but he had to admit, he really only had eyes for the boss, and not for strictly professional reasons, truth be told.
Everything on the Storm Coast is soggy and salt-lashed and miserable, bleeding together into the same colorless grey blur, from the clouds that hang threateningly overhead to the choppy waves that gnawed on the beach to the jagged cliffs and mountains that thrust up aggressively into the ever-present rain. Everything except him.
Lavellan had worn a pale green coat that day, as the Bull recalls, like he was trying to blend in and not draw attention to himself, but it was simply no use. All those golden curls, half-tamed and braided back on one side, all that bronze skin and the striking, bottle green, almond-shaped eyes. The plush bow of his mouth, the graceful lines of vallaslin accentuating the high arch of his cheekbones--the Bull could go on. He’d been like a golden idol wrapped in drab.
The Bull remembers looking at those green eyes and thinking of the way sunlight looks when it filters through a forest canopy.
Of course, a short while later they’d run into a Fade Rift, and, between fighting off hoards of demons (fuck you, Krem) and watching the hot piece of ass he’d just been ogling command a tear in reality to close with a wave of his fucking hand, he’d more or less thought that color ruined forever. Fade Green, not Sunshine-Through-Trees Green.
Amazing what you could grow accustomed to.
He hadn’t set out to sleep with the boss. Bad idea just in general, usually, to fuck your employer, and then, of course, mage . The Bull didn’t touch mages. Too many demons in the bed.
But Lavellan had flirted and the Bull had flirted back, which was fun.
The Inquisitor puts on a stoic, serious face for the public and for the general Inquisition forces, the ones who need a strong figurehead to fall in behind, all tightlaced and straight-backed, proud bearing. He manages to be a near-perfect counter to Lady DeFer; if she is the perfect Circle Mage, elegant, graceful, civilized to a fault, he is the perfect apostate, proud and powerful yet always in control.
But anyone who goes out into the field with him sees a different side. At camp and on the road trudging between missions, Lavellan loosens up considerably, teasing Sera like a sibling and casually goading Solas and Dorian into nonsensical debates.
He likes to make outlandish and blatantly untrue claims about “ancient Dalish wisdom,” partly for his own amusement, partly because, in the beginning, everyone was too wary of offending him to contradict him, and partly, he confessed privately to the Bull somewhere in Crestwood, to see the vein over Solas’s right eye twitch, and because Cassandra gets so offended when she realizes he is pulling her leg.
He snorts with laughter at all of the Bull’s worst puns, even throws a few truly terrible ones of his own out in response (to the utter disgust of Varric and Dorian), and the Bull reflects absently that that , of all things, might be part of the reason his rules regarding the Inquisitor and mages in general started to bend.
The first time… the Bull isn’t certain he can justify the first time in a way that would hold much water, really. Tallis said to get close to him, but there were other ways to do that than a honeypot. The flirting, the casual innuendoes, the blatantly appreciative glances, had reached a boiling point. Sera threw bread crusts at them and told them to just fuck already, and Varric complained that if this were a story he was writing the readers would have all expired from the sexual tension by that point, but that wasn’t it, either.
It was the way Lavellan sat next to him in the tavern, unapologetically hiding from everyone who wanted him to be the Herald behind the Bull’s bigger body as he drew stories about him from his Chargers and seemed to hang on every word. The way he said something to Dalish in Elvhen shortly after meeting her that seemed to sooth some old hurt in her that the Bull hadn’t even known was there. The way he leaned into the Bull’s side when Krem got to the good part of a story, and tossed his head back with laughter so that his golden curls caressed the Bull’s skin.
It was watching him in battle, every movement fluid and practiced, but not nearly so economical as Vivianne or as showy as Dorian as they hurl spells at their foes. More like a dance, like mastering the magic was his greatest joy and passion. All the raw power of the Fade, and he had it on a leash. Terrifying. And sexy as hell.
So. The first time happened, and even if the Bull couldn’t justify it fully it was still fantastic, one for the memory banks, without a doubt. And then the second time took the Bull by surprise and was even better than the first.
And then he saw the mark and… what?
It didn’t have to mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. Micah Lavellan--the Bull doesn’t know what the name looks like in elvhen but it doesn’t seem long enough to match his memory of the long-gone mark. And even if it was--it doesn’t matter. There are no soulmates under the qun, and the Iron Bull has no soulmark. It doesn’t change anything.