Chapter Text
“I still think you’re being ridiculous,” Iron Bull says around a mouthful of ale. Somehow he’s managed to not laugh even a little bit, even though if their positions were swapped Cullen would most assuredly be laughing at himself. Just as soon as he gets over this feeling of overwhelming dread.
“You don’t understand… She was very upset,” Cullen mumbles into his own, mostly untouched, mug. Ale isn't his typical drink of choice, nor is drinking much at all, truth be told. He had only even ventured into the Herald’s Rest in search of a bottle of wine to avoid running into Leliana in the main hall. The spymaster would have taken one look at him and read every tense line in his body and so, naturally, he went for option two.
What he neglected to remember was the Iron Bull’s somewhat permanent inhabitation of the bottom floor of the Rest. Nothing escaped the Qunari’s eyes, let alone the rare sight of the commander in the tavern seemingly of his own volition.
“I saw the boss earlier,” Iron Bull had begun conversationally. “Before she headed out with the others. Funny - it looked as though she’d been crying.”
And that is how Cullen finds himself wheeled into a corner with a mug of something most assuredly foul and an overly chatty Qunari spy looming over him.
“Whatever you did, just apologize,” Bull says wisely as he takes another hefty swig. “Grovel at her feet for a bit, get a bit of flowers together, and you’re good to go. Women like that sort of stuff.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Cullen grumbles before he can stop himself. The last thing he needs is Bull looking into things decidedly not his business, and now he watches with annoyance as the Qunari’s good eye widens with interest.
“You know,” Bull begins after a long moment and Cullen bites back a groan. “It’s your private affairs–”
“It is.”
“–and the Inquisitor doesn’t like when I snoop–”
“Nor do I, if it matters to you at all.”
“But this is the first sort of fight the two of you have gotten into, right?”
“We’re not fighting.” Which is a lie. He doesn’t bother to ask how the Qunari could possibly know that. It seems that as much as they thought their relationship had remained private for those early months, it seems neither the Inquisitor or her commander were quite as subtle as they believed. “It’s not - I don’t know why I’m even talking to you about this. It’s none of your business!”
Bull leans back in his chair, and the wood creaks ominously under his weight. Clever, Cullen thinks, for Bull to stick them in this particular corner where they are mostly hidden from view by the corner of the stairs, and what little of Cullen could be seen is blocked by the Qunari’s broad shoulders.
He isn’t scared of Bull, far from it, and Cullen lifts his chin to stare down the Qunari with a scowl.
“Okay, so clearly you’re upset too,” Bull points out after a tense pause and Cullen feels his cheeks flush red. “I get it. We’re not exactly friends. But if you want…you can tell me.”
Cullen tries and fails to hide an incredulous laugh and finally takes a mouthful of his ale. It is indeed rank as it sets the back of his throat aflame in an instant. Thankfully, he manages to resist a cough, something he figures would earn him little respect from the mercenary sitting across from him.
“I’m quite alright, thank you.” And now Cullen makes to stand up, intending to leave before this conversation devolves any more. But the look Iron Bull levels on him is enough to stop him in his tracks and he makes no effort to shift so that Cullen can step around him.
“And you haven’t been sleeping,” Bull considers, stroking his chin.
Cullen’s eyes narrow with suspicion. “Been watching me, haven’t you?”
“I watch everyone,” Bull says pleasantly and perhaps he should have expected that.
“Lyrium withdrawal is a bitch, isn’t it?” he murmurs next, and Cullen drops back into his seat with a thud.
“How did you–”
Bull taps the side of his nose as he offers a wry smile. “Ben-Hassarath, remember?”
“You can’t–” This is not how Cullen expected this night to go. So much for retreating back to his office to feel sorry for himself over a wine-sodden nightcap. Instead, he’s trapped here with quite literally the last person at Skyhold that he wants prying into his relationship with the Inquisitor.
Except perhaps Varric. Damn dwarf would have a book written about him before sunrise.
“Can’t what?” Bull considers him. “Can’t tell anyone? Don’t worry, that’s not exactly my style. I happen to be on your side.”
Cullen has no response for this and instead takes another furious sip of his ale. It goes down no easier than the last.
“I know it’s easy for me to say,” Bull says slowly, running a long finger around the rim of his tankard. “But there’s nothing to be embarrassed about here. I can tell you something embarrassing about me, if it’ll make you feel better. Let’s see, there was once this bird in Antiva, man she did not like it when I took off my—”
“Thank you, Bull!” Cullen interrupts hurriedly, not even daring to wonder where that particular story was going. “That’s quite enough!”
Bull shrugs one meaty shoulder. “Probably not relevant to your problem anyway. Listen, Cullen–” And now he drags his chair even closer to the other side of the table with a scraping sound that rings about, crowding the commander into the wall as the Qunari stares at him. His gaze, even with one eye, is piercing. “I’m not going to make you tell me anything. But if anyone needs a sounding board to work through their issues, it’s you. I remember Haven and what an asshole you were all the time. That was the lyrium talking. Now you’ve got that same damned look on your face, and I don’t want to have my mornings interrupted by whining rookies that you’ve got running laps around the grounds at the ass crack of dawn all because you pissed off your girlfriend.”
Cullen sets his jaw, rather taken aback by the fierceness to the Qunari’s words; this, seemingly, is Bull’s intended effect as he settles back into his chair looking more than a little self-satisfied.
“So,” Bull offers after a stretch of painfully awkward silence. “If you want to talk, I’m all ears.”
“You’re Ben-Hassrath,” Cullen tells him stiffly. Beneath the table, his knee is starting to bounce in a way it rarely does. The Order trained its officers out of many of their ticks—yet not all for him, it seems. “My private life doesn’t belong in a report.”
“You think I put everything in my missives?” Bull waves a careless hand. “Nah, they don’t care about you and this. And even if they did…” He makes a funny little bobbing motion with his head as he thinks it over. “...I like you alright so far, so I’m going to give you one free conversation. For the next five minutes, pretend I’m not.”
“Pretend you’re not Ben-Hassrath?” Cullen asks dubiously, and Bull shrugs again.
“I didn’t say it would be perfect,” he admits. “But you’re welcome to try.” And then he folds his arms across his chest and looks at Cullen rather expectantly.
It had been impossible, before, to explain this to her. To even know where to begin with untangling the mess and cobwebs and chains that is the inside of Cullen’s mind. Every time it came up, he would turn the words over and over to himself, memorizing where to inflect, where to pause, what to say if she says this so that when he brought it up, he would be ready. But every time he went to do it, the words faltered.
But, perhaps this might be easier. It’s true that Bull is not a friend, but he’s also not an enemy, not yet. And whatever reservations Cullen has about cracking himself open for an openly confessed foreign spy are quickly dashed by the knowledge that whatever secrets Cullen choses to share, the Iron Bull surely already knows, or would not stop until he found out.
That, and Bull is…knowledgeable, to say the least, about the particular matter Cullen is parsing through.
“Maeve and I are…together,” Cullen begins, keeping his voice as low as he dares even though their little corner of the tavern is blissfully empty. Still, he knows Sera lurks in the top floors here, and scratch what he thought before– that is the last person at Skyhold he wants prying into his relationship.
“We’re together,” Cullen repeats, and now he can feel the sweat dripping down the small of his back. “And it’s…nice. It’s really nice. I’ve never had - not like this - and she’s just–”
“She’s Maeve,” Bull says knowingly.
“Exactly!” Cullen takes a deep breath, because it’s been a while since he did that, as he frantically runs through what to say next. He’s not exactly sure how to put this all into words; he hadn’t known with her, but maybe with someone else… “She’s - she’s everything . But - but there’s this thing - Maker’s breath.”
“I’m listening,” is all Bull says. He’s still looking at Cullen, that knowing little gleam in his eye that Cullen absolutely hates. And so he seizes the opportunity to bring his gaze to the ceiling and not feel even a little bit bad about it.
“I can’t,” Cullen grits out all at once, and maybe this is where he expires on the spot, right here in this tavern on a mountain at nine bells on a fucking Tuesday night. “Have sex with her. Or I can - we have - I just–” He balls his hands into a fist on the table, and his skin scraping on the wood stands out to him in the sudden suffocating silence.
Bull scratches his chin. “What, you can’t get hard?”
Impossibly, Cullen flushes an even darker shade of red. This seems to be answer enough for Bull, who remarks not unkindly, “You know they’ve got herbs for that, right?”
“I know that,” Cullen snaps, and then catches himself when a trio of soldiers on the far end of the room glance over to them. “It doesn’t always - it’s the lyrium, or at least the - the withdrawals.“
Lyrium has taken much from him, the withdrawals even more. In some tucked away corner of his brain, Cullen has made an absent note of his general disinterest in sex these last few years, how even touching himself brings little pleasure. But Maker how he aches for Maeve, perhaps more than he’s longed for anything in his entire life. The first time he followed her to her chambers, lips already kiss-swollen like some lovesick teenager, he had been so ready, so desperate for her as she unlaced his breeches—and then watched as her face twisted in confusion when she found him half limp.
She’s understanding. More than understanding about that, really, if Cullen is truthful. In these moments he flushes hot with frustration and embarrassment until she kisses him softer than he could ever possibly deserve, and she lets him touch her still. If lyrium withdrawals were the only barrier here, perhaps he could wrap his mind around it.
But that’s not all.
“I have no problem doing...that…with her…” Cullen finally forces, eyes still locked on the planks of the ceiling even as his face burns with mortification. “But when she wants to…do things…to me…”
“Ah.” It’s infuriating how much understanding the Iron Bull packs into such a little sound.
Cullen keeps his eyes on the ceiling, one, two three, and then chances a look across the table. Bull hasn’t moved, not even a little bit, just sitting there with that same thoughtful look on his face.
“And I don’t know why,” Cullen continues, shame curdling even more when it comes out as a strangled whisper. “She’s - she’s - I like her. I like being with her. I like thinking about being with her. But when she wants to - when she tries to return - I can’t. I freeze. And I’ve pushed her away because of it.”
Her. Falling away from him with a gasp of surprise. Her gaze. Shock, confusion, fear, hurt.
“Did you just–”
Bull considers this for a moment. And then, “How long have you two been together?” As if he doesn’t already know.
“Five months, two weeks, and three days,” Cullen says immediately and watches as Bull’s brows raise.
“And you just… like her.”
“Well, I–” That’s another thing that’s been brewing inside Cullen for quite some time, made only worse by the life-upending horror that had been seeing Maeve fall into the Fade at Adamant. He’d been so sure he’d lost her then, for whatever else could have caused the yawning chasm behind his breastbone, the pain under his skin, the scream trapped behind his teeth.
He’d been so sure he’d lost her then, without ever telling her…
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Cullen finally says. “I mean, I want to talk about it. But not, uh, not with you.”
“Fair enough,” Bull chuckles. “So–” He leans forward over the table so much that Cullen can smell the sour drink on his breath. “You’ve got a problem with Maeve fucking you.”
Cullen chokes on his ale and this time he really does dissolve into a fit of coughing. The Qunari waits patiently as he fights for breath through the fiery spit that’s erupting in his throat, before he’s finally able to gasp out “It’s not - let’s not use - we’re not trying to do… that .”
“Control,” Bull offers as if Cullen hasn’t said anything at all. “You like to be in control of, well, everything. Plenty of soldiers do. Plenty of people like to be in control in bed. Nothing wrong with that.”
“It’s not control,” he shakes his head. “At least, I don’t think it’s control. It could, of course, be that. But, eh, it’s more…” Cullen falters, the practiced script falling away from him at the dubious look on Bull’s face.
Bull purses his lips. “Do you trust her?”
“Of course I trust her,” Cullen insists, outraged a little that Bull would be so quick to assume otherwise, but the anger quickly dies when Bull gives him another of those damned patient looks.
“She is,” Bull says quietly, still hunched over the table towards the commander. “A mage. I ask again, do you trust her?”
Cullen flinches back, his armor meeting the wall behind him with a soft thud. It feels wrong to ever think of Maeve in the same context of the mages in Kinloch or Kirkwall. He had been frightened of them, he can see that clearly now. Other templars would readily volunteer to escort mages to and from their quarters after hours, some even stepping forward on their own. But Cullen would always take at least two others with him, even for the meekest of mages. It was fear that drove him to such paranoia and to Meredith’s den, to more lyrium to drown out the nightmares and to a detached coolness he knew scared the mages in turn.
The maleficar of Kinloch: cutting, burning, mocking. Maeve, rose-scented bathwater and spindleweed under her fingernails and soft hands in his hair at the end of a long day.
It's silly, when he really thinks about it. He's trusted her with more of himself than he has ever given another person, two decades of keeping his mouth shut wiped away in an instant with the first knock on the post outside his shoddy tent in Haven. But the moment she wants to put her mouth on his cock is when he freezes up. Maker's breath.
Cullen scrubs a hand over his face and thinks–thinks of her, who even when she is exhausted from her own work will carve out time for him and her alone. She who will do things sometimes that are achingly sweet in a way he’s only ever seen with his own parents as a child, like bring him back little pastries or books on Ferelden mythology, just because she was thinking of him. Or, now that their courtship is more or less public, she will be far less hesitant amongst their friends to call him “darling” and “dear” and, of course, “duck,” a funny little Marcher pet name she bestowed upon him one day before they even starting seeing each other. Cullen hasn’t had any want to change it, no matter how many teasing looks he gets from Varric.
“I trust her,” Cullen says firmly, perhaps more firm than he’s ever been about anything in his life. “Whatever reservations I have with magic, she bears none of them.”
“Alright then.” Bull scratches his chin as he considers the same bit of ceiling Cullen was just staring at. “So, control.”
“I just told you it’s not–” Cullen clamps his mouth shut when Bull looks back at him, only a little unimpressed.
“When you have sex with her,” Bull says mildly, as if he and the commander are discussing the weather rather than the most intimate relationship Cullen has ever had in his entire life. “You take the lead, I’m guessing. And when she wants to take the lead, that’s when you have a problem.”
Cullen isn’t quite sure he’s able to articulate just how appealing the idea of submitting to Maeve is, at least when he turns the idea over in his head in a sort of abstract, clinical manner. There’s even less of a chance he’s going to admit that to Bull, how he lies awake at night thinking of her above and around him with all her strength and grace.
Bull is still looking at him, long fingers on the rim of his mug as he waits the commander out.
“I want to be present in those moments,” Cullen finally says in a low voice. He runs his fingers over the grain of the table before him, frowning when his rough nails catch on the wood. “But it’s like my mind becomes…no longer in my body.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“Of course we talk!” Cullen scoffs, suddenly angry as he stares fiercely at Bull. “We have to talk whenever - whenever I can’t get my body to work right and I just don’t know what the hell is wrong with me–”
“Have you talked about Kinloch?” Bull asks quietly and the bottom just about drops out of Cullen’s stomach.
A noose, tightening. Chains around his wrists to bind, to hold, to imprison .
“You don’t know anything about Kinloch,” he manages to bite out behind bared teeth; bile rises in his throat, churning, burning, roiling. “You don’t know anything about me, how fucking dare you–”
“Templar records are surprisingly easy to track down,” Bull interrupts. He’s barely moved from his position at the table. To any unassuming eyes, they might be two friends sharing a drink, instead of whatever...whatever this has turned into. “An entire Circle falls in Ferelden to blood magic, saved by the Hero of Ferelden… Someone didn’t try hard enough to bury that.”
“No one buried it,” Cullen says, and he feels numb even as something in him catches on a memory, dragging in the dirt behind him until he can no longer carry it, just waiting for him to stumble. “I didn’t - no one talked about it. It just was a part of me. It is a part of me.”
Bull raises his eyebrow. “Seems like a good place to start,” he says, but his voice is painfully soft.
Cullen exhales in a long, low rattle and they sit in the corner for a long time in silence, the ale burning a hole in his belly all the while.
Predictably, he spends the next week decidedly not thinking about it. Instead, Cullen fills his days with meetings and drills and research into templar supply lines. When he sleeps he does not dream, yet when he wakes he is drenched in sweat, fingers convulsing in the sheets and a garbled scream trapped behind his throat.
He thinks, often, of the lyrium sitting behind lock and key right here in the keep for their mages and former templars. It would be too easy to give the order for a philter to be brought to him, to feel that cool song slip down his throat. But these thoughts Cullen puts away with no small amount of effort, and carries on the work.
On the fifth night, he spends it staring at the summer night sky through the hole in his ceiling. As a child his mother often took Cullen and his siblings into the hills around their farm to count the stars, and now his eyes trace Visus and Fulmenos. Judex, the Sword of Mercy, twinkles into existence to the left: the symbol of guilt. He swallows around the knot in his throat.
No more running.
And then he goes down to his desk, pulls out a fresh leaf of parchment, and pens a resignation letter.
Maeve returns from Ferelden in the late afternoon of the sixth day after his talk with the Iron Bull. She cuts a slim figure against the late summer sky as her small party treks up the mountain roads, tiredly slumped on her horse. He paces the battlements, hands tucked behind his back to stop their shaking. He’s never well when she’s away, fearful with every raven that arrives it will bear news of her death. And with the way they parted before, he worries even more that her anger persists.
He meets her in the courtyard to help her dismount, though he knows she is more than capable of doing it on her own. Still, she offers a small, hesitant smile that surprises him. He tries to return, and finds only a writhing mass of anxiety in his belly.
“Welcome back, Inquisitor,” Cullen murmurs, horribly aware of Blackwall and Dorian’s gazes on him. They know , he thinks, for what else would cause that hard judgement.
He tears his eyes from them when a hand lands on his shoulder. “Come find me later?” She asks and he nods wordlessly, hoping the misery does not show in his face too badly.
Later, he will be ashamed at his avoidance of her. Stacks of reports go rifled through and marked as he paces his office, headache drumming the back of his eyelids. It’s not until the candles burn low and his eyes grow tired that he finally admits it’s time to stop this cowardice. She deserves better than him. She always has.
“Quincy?” He calls, just when his captains and lieutenants are filing into his office for evening reports. The young man’s head lifts from his careful copying out requisition requests. He’s one of Josephine’s; a good lad and an even better secretary.
“Take this to the Inquisitor’s office, if you please? And then finish your night.”
“Of course, ser!”
Cullen breathes a soft sigh of relief as the boy hurries off, letter held in his office as delicately as if it were gold. Little does he know…
Rylen, Wolffe, Fallon, and Clarke are looking at him expectantly to begin the meeting, and so he sits at the desk, stares down at a map, and desperately tries not to think about how this will be one of his last meetings with them.
This he will miss. Cullen has spent the better part of his life training and living with other soldiers, first as an initiate, then as a junior officer in Ferelden, and finally in Kirkwall. There is a fierceness to the work that he has always enjoyed. Moderating frustration, commemorating success however small it may be. He remembers his early steps in training; the joy at earning his place amongst his colleagues. Even in the brief days between quitting the Order and being recruited into the Inquisition, he had convinced himself to join the Wardens. To make some good from his life after so much destruction. But now the Wardens are at the mercy of Corypheus and Cullen has no interest in becoming another madman’s puppet.
What will he do now that he’s left the Inquisition too? Cullen isn’t sure it matters anymore. Alas, that will be a decision for tomorrow. He still needs to figure out how to tell the rest of the advisors of his early departure, or perhaps the Inquisitor will dismiss him on the spot and relay his sorry tale to the rest?
It’s not long until his decision is taken from him. Fallon is just wrapping up their summary of current training progress when the door to the office bangs open. They all jump, springing to attention with hands flying to swords, but pause when they see who has unceremoniously barged in.
Maeve stands primly silhouetted against the torchlit castle, and in her hand she holds a folded bit of parchment Cullen recognizes as the letter he sent to her not an hour ago.
A block of ice slides into his chest.
“My apologies for interrupting, soldiers,” Maeve says pleasantly. Her eyes are fixed on Cullen, blue chips of unreadable marble. “Mind if I borrow Commander Rutherford for a moment?”
He can’t remember the last time she’s called him that. Not since Haven, he thinks.
Rylen hesitates, shooting a nervous glance to Cullen before he clears his throat and murmurs, “Of course, Inquisitor. Ser.” He offers a short bow to the two of them, then promptly hastes ufor the door, the other officers on his heels. There are a few seconds of heavy, awkward quiet until the door clicks shut and it is just Cullen and Maeve alone.
“A very curious thing happened to me just now,” Maeve begins conversationally. “I was just sitting down for my evening meal, wondering where in the world my darling man has been all day when he knows I’ve just arrived back, when what should come to my office but this fascinating piece of literature?”
She holds up the letter, and a second realization strikes Cullen like a bolt of lightning. She is furious, perhaps the angriest he has ever seen her, and this must the sort of fear her enemies must feel before she incinerates them with a snap of her fingers.
“Inquisitor–”
“Don’t bullshit me with that,” she says through gritted teeth, and now she draws herself up, all five-feet-nine-inches of her, as she stalks slowly towards him, almost catlike with her movements. “What the hell is this?”
“I think you’ll find it’s perfectly clear–”
“You think I would allow you to resign?”
“ Allow me?!” Cullen gapes at her, completely aghast. His temper, one he has fought tooth and nail to keep in check over the years, rises sharply. A deficit of sleep over the last week drives him to a harsher tone quicker than he might normally speak. “You cannot keep me here if I wish to go!”
“No,” she says coolly, regarding him with obvious displeasure. “If you had proper cause to retire before our mission was complete, then it would be evaluated as is typical for all senior officers. But you do not have cause or reason, and therefore your request is denied .”
“Proper cause?” Cullen sputters out. ‘I don’t have a proper cause? I harmed my commanding officer. Men have been executed for less!”
“Perhaps amongst the Templar Order that was a more common occurrence,” Maeve drawls and he cannot help but flinch. “But there are no executions here. And there will certainly not be for this.” And then she sighs, and rubs the bridge of her nose between two fingers.
Torchlight spins her copper hair into liquid flame, smooths some of the lines on her face and carves out others. She looks utterly exhausted, and then Cullen takes a deeper look. Her clothes are rumpled when she typically is immaculate, wrinkled wool and hastily tied laces on her jacket that threaten to come undone any second. The shadows under her eyes are present as they always are but against her pale skin they hang particularly heavy. Has she been crying, or is it just the fatigue from long days of travel that has her eyes so red?
“This isn’t how I wanted this to go,” Maeve mutters into her hands. “You weren’t supposed to…you weren’t supposed to quit , Cullen.”
His mouth works silently for a few moments, open and close and open and close, before he manages to steal his nerves. “I have little choice in the matter,” Cullen says stiffly. “You are a fool if you do not take it seriously.”
“Oh I am taking it extremely seriously,” she snaps, settling her hands on her hips as she glares once more at him, her mouth drawn into a tight line. “And my decision is final.”
“You’re making a mistake. I cannot be–”
“What? Trusted?”
Cullen springs to his feet, his chair toppling backward to clatter against the wall. “Yes! Maeve, yes! Is that what you want me to say?!” He very nearly seizes handfuls of his own hair out of frustration as his feet carry him around the desk, closer to her with frantic energy. “If I cannot control my own actions then you must relinquish me of my duties and entrust them to someone who can .”
She’s shaking her head. Maker, how can she of all people not understand? “It doesn’t warrant a removal. It’s only a–”
“I Smited you!” Cullen bellows. An ink well on his desk wobbles and then falls with a shatter across the floor.
Her mouth clamps shut at once, color rising to her cheeks and across her ears. Cullen’s chest heaves, his face burns, and the throbbing in his temples is so great he’s convinced that it will burst any second now.
“I Smited you,” he repeats, quieter now but no less incensed. “In the midst of…extreme intimacy. It is unacceptable. It cannot happen again, it will not. That is why I must leave.”
Maeve frowns at him, silent for a few long moments, before she asks, “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Cullen blinks, wind taken out of his sails at the sudden change of conversation. “What?”
“Tea, dear. I’m making tea and asking you if you would like a cup,” she says, rolling her eyes at him as she crosses to the little cabinet where he keeps a battered tea kettle and boxes of tea leaves. “You have some of that Treviso blend left that Josephine got you for your birthday, don’t you?” She is already measuring out the leaves for the pot and igniting a rune at its base with a touch of her hand to heat the water.
“I don’t want tea.”
“Suit yourself, though you might reconsider. You look terrible.”
“Enough,” Cullen growls, balling his hands into fists at his side. “Mae, you cannot be serious. Last week, I-I–”
“I’m not ignoring last week,” she cuts him off as he begins to stammer, mind too caught up in the what and the why and the I can never let this happen again. She turns back to him, a cup of hot tea in her grasp. “Sit, why don’t you.” It is not phrased as a question.
He chews on his lip, not sure he will be able to get out of this one easily, and gingerly settles back down into his chair. Maeve sits across from him for the first time in months, not bothering to drag her chair closer to his as she usually would, or perch on the side of his desk until Cullen gives up and pulls her into his lap. Even in her own office with its formal hard-backed chairs, she prefers to balance on his thighs as they comb through reports together. Highly unprofessional, she once remarked, not that either of them particularly cared about professional decorum behind closed doors.
But now she might as well be on the other side of Skyhold.
“I’m not ignoring it,” Maeve repeats as she drops a cube of sugar into her cup. “I’m upset. Very upset, actually, at your letter. I don’t see any reason for you to resign. Last week did not involve your duties as commander of this army in any way. They were entirely personal.”
He opens his mouth in warning protest but she’s already continuing. “Furthermore, I was more startled than hurt by the Smite. It’s been many years since I’ve felt the full effects of templar abilities. Yours are…diminished significantly without lyrium. I’m more concerned about, well, you.”
“I’m fine,” Cullen replies automatically, even as his stomach turns over uncomfortably.
“No you’re not,” she says simply. “You’re not all right, Cullen. After I left I thought a lot about what happened, and I don’t know… Did I catch you at a bad time? Was the pain worse and I just didn’t see? Did I not realize you were hurting? ” Her cool mask fractures a little, anguish appearing in her eyes, and Cullen itches to touch her. He keeps his hands bolted in his lap.
“You’re not to resign,” Maeve says, and her voice is very firm. “But if you require time away from Skyhold, I would grant that in a heartbeat.”
“I don’t want a break.”
“But you’d leave the Inquisition.”
“To protect you, yes!”
“You didn’t hurt me, Cullen. At least not physically–” Maeve blows hair out of her face with a frustrated huff. “There’s this closed door that you won’t open for me. You keep bottling up whatever’s in there with you more and more, and then–and then it doesn’t have anywhere to go so it explodes. I’m not a mind reader.”
“I know you’re not,” he croaks, anger deflating out of him as quickly as it had come.
“I don’t need your protection,” she says, still frowning across the desk at him. “But I do need your trust if we’re going to work through whatever this is.”
Cullen drags a hand over his face, cold fingers pulling at his tired eyes. “What happened last week…it can never happen again, Mae. I won’t let it happen again.”
“So talk to me,” she whispers, and now she sets her mostly untouched cup of tea on the desk so she can reach out to offer her hand to him, palm up on the desk. Andstraste preserve him, he meets her halfway, tangling his fingers with hers in an instant.
“When you’re ready… I’m here. I’m not afraid. And if you come to realize that you don’t - that this isn’t something you want, then that’s alright. We can - we can figure that out too.”
Cullen notices the way she catches herself mid-sentence. Wonders hopelessly what it is she was going to say. If you don’t want me. But he does and that’s the problem, more than he could ever put into words. His hand on hers is so tight he worries he’s hurting her, but Maker, he hopes this isn’t the last touch he gets.
“It’s too much,” Cullen admits and his voice wavers at the end. He clears his throat, willing himself to get through this at least. “You don’t need more weight to carry.”
“When will you see that you are deserving of the same love that you give me?” Maker damn him for doing this to her...she sounds so very sad. “If you were to leave, I’d follow you to the very end of Thedas to make sure you were safe.”
He finally lets his head hang as his eyesight blurs. You should be afraid, he wants to say. There’s a nagging thing at the back of his mind, a chain looping around his neck to remind him of–of something.But she’s back home and safe and everything is fine–so lovely with her hair falling loose and curly down her back, looking at him with those weary blue eyes. Not lyrium blue. Blue like cloudless skies, like ink smudges on his fingers, like the waters of the creek near Honnleath, like the slippers she keeps in her quarters for him in case his toes get cold on the stone floors.
Instead Cullen finally mumbles, “I think…I think I’ll take that tea now, actually.”
“Alright, duck.” And then she is squeezing his hand, her mere touch radiating a gentleness that he has not earned, will never earn – and Cullen is consumed with self-loathing.