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Quick, Bright, Easy

@wardsarefunctioning is the nicest ever and commissioned me to write about Ashara and Lucius, in an AU in which they are secretly sleeping together! Thank you friend <3 <3 <3 It was fun taking these characters into a modern space and playing around with this scenario.

My Ko-Fi || My Commissions (Slots currently CLOSED as of 7/29/19)

Pairing: Ashara Lavellan x Lucius Talvas

Rating: Mature. There is smut but it is not overly explicit. Read at your own discretion!

*****************

As usual, when Ashara made it to Lucius’s dorm room, she was already going a mile a minute. Already kissing him, one hand already on his belt. She smelled like soap and the leave-in conditioner she used religiously on her thick curly hair, and before he was really processing anything, his hands were already tangled in that hair, pulling her closer, breathing harshly against her lips.

“Careful,” she murmured. “I have class in half an hour. Can’t mess up the hair. But also hurry. I have class in half an hour.”

He laughed, and her cheeks pinked with embarrassment.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said, pushing him a step or two back. “We have an exam today and I’m all wound up and I -”

Lucius silenced her with another kiss, with his hands on her ass now, pulling her tight against him. The sundress she was wearing was thin and he could feel the heat of her skin through the fabric and Maker he was already hard, and minutes ago he had been studying for his own exams and now he’d forgotten everything he’d ever learned about property law and the nature of limited liability corporations (not that he had ever really cared that much about them in the first place). All that mattered now was that Ash was here, and in his arms, her hand already snaking down the front of his jeans, gripping him tight.

Things were always fast with her, it seemed. She thought fast, talked fast, learned fast. She was quick to push him backwards towards his bedroom, to pull the sundress over her head, baring all that perfect brown freckled skin beneath it, the simple brown cotton bra and underwear beneath that. She’d been fast to befriend him after that first day they met in the campus library six months before, at the start of the fall term. She was a firstyear student at the University of Kirkwall but she was already fast knocking out the classes for her degree (Physics of the Fade with a minor in Elvhen Cultural Studies).

And when they’d first kissed, four months ago, she’d been quick to deepen it. They were at a Wintersend party at their friend Laurence’s fraternity, in a quiet corner, and Lucius was tall but so was she and she was on tiptoe and he wanted nothing more than to keep kissing her. But he’d had to pull back, tell her the truth that had been knotted around his heart ever since he realized he was falling for her.

“My work-study program - they have very strict rules about dating. I can’t - we can’t - unless it’s a secret.”

And she’d been fast to accept that. Sure, whatever, it’s fine, we don’t need to be that serious anyway.

And now here she was, in his dorm, fast removing his clothes, kissing his collarbone, grinding against his thigh. And she was, as always, a wonder in his arms, and he feared, as always, that it would be over as fast as it had begun. This secret between them. The sweet sound she made when he slipped a hand between them, played with her over her underwear, pushed the underwear aside so he could feel how wet she was.

“Fenedhis,” she swore, her palms slapping against his headboard, and then she whimpered when he entered her, and he wanted to hear that sound every day, he wanted to hold her hand when they walked to and from class, he wanted to take her to one of the nice restaurants off campus, but he was a poor Tevene student from a poor family and this work-study program was the only thing keeping him in school, paying his tuition and putting food on his plate, and so this had to stay a secret.

But all of that fell away as he watched her, all but riding his hand as he fingered her, her own fingernails digging into the headboard. As she pulled away, fumbled through the drawer in his nightstand and found a condom, took him out of his briefs, rolled the condom down, and then sank down on him. Then there was nothing but how good it felt to be in her, close to her. She bent down and rested her forehead against his and it filled him with a tenderness that overwhelmed all of his senses, that forced helpless sounds up from his throat as he kissed her, bucked up into her, everything forgotten but the present moment -

And then, of course, his phone rang.

He had every single contact in there set to vibrate, except for one - Magister Corix, president of the Kirkwall chapter of the Nicon Estoris Center. His boss, and the reason his feelings for the beautiful woman above him had to stay secret.

"Shit. Sorry. Hang on. I have to take this."

Just as she'd been fast with everything, Ash was fast to listen. She pulled away from him, scrambled to the end of the bed, panting, apologizing. Lucius took a second to catch his breath, cleared his throat, and answered the phone.

"Hello?"

"Lucius. You sound out of breath."

Lucius closed his eyes, tempted to pray to the Maker he didn't believe in. "Sorry. I'm at the gym."

"I see. Go ahead and wrap up there - I have another mailing I'd like to get out before close of business today and I'll need you to come in as soon as you can."

"Understood. I'll be there in forty-five minutes."

"Sooner if you can. There are at least one hundred envelopes to be stuffed."

Corix hung up. Lucius had been working for him since he was a first year himself, and in those five years he still had not seemed to grasp that Lucius did not have a car, that forty-five minutes was the absolute fastest he could get from the University's Lowtown campus to the Center's Hightown office if he took the bus. Nor did he understand that most voters weren't going to open the mailings that Lucius would painstakingly assemble all afternoon. That was probably a good thing, though. The Nicon Estoris Center was focused primarily on so-called traditional Thedosian politics, and promoting the interests of the Chantry, and Lucius didn't particularly want anyone to open their mailings. He didn't particularly want to work there at all. But it was the only nonprofit that would pay the lion's share of his tuition, and his parents were so proud of him for going to college, and it wasn't like they were as reactionary as the Venatori faction that had been trying to influence Tevene politics and Thedosian politics at large -

And to be frank it hadn't really mattered all that much to him until this year. Until he met the woman sitting nervous and cross-legged at the foot of his bed, chewing her lower lip. The delicate points of her elven ears just visible through the cloud of her curls. Exactly the sort of person that the stewards of the Nicon-Estoris Center would never approve of.

All participants in the work-study will uphold the values of the Center in all aspects of their daily lives. This extends to their romantic involvements. Failure to uphold these values will result in termination of participants' work-study benefits.

They didn't say it explicitly, but Lucius had stuffed enough envelopes and edited enough promotional material to know what they meant. First, no sex outside of marriage, period. Second, that eventual marriage was to be with a Tevene woman. There was no room for any of the things he had ever felt towards other men. Or for what he felt for Ashara Lavellan, an elf, and the brightest and kindest person he knew.

"I should go," she said awkwardly, rising, looking around for the sundress she had discarded.

"Yeah. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I've got that exam. Do you think you'll still make it to D&D tonight?"

"I think so. I'll probably be late though."

"That's okay. I'll let the others know. See you then."

She stood looking down at him, dressed but still flushed with desire, pink along the hollow of her throat and the rise of her breasts, the pupils of her big blue eyes still dilated. Before Lucius could say anything else she bent down and kissed his cheek. She drew back but her hand was still cupping his face, her thumb drawing a pattern across his cheekbone. She looked at him another moment, something like fear in her eyes, and then she was gone as fast as she arrived.

*

Lucius had never put that much energy into love and relationships. He'd been shy and awkward since the day he was born if you listened to his mother. He'd attended an integrated school in Vyrantium, in an era when the Tevene school system was trying to prove that mages and non-mages could have the exact same education, right down to their classes in practical magical applications. The end result as far as his social life was concerned was that he was isolated from the non-mage students who resented those who still had magic, an increasingly rare skill in modern Thedas, and one the teachers still fussed over despite being told to treat all students as equal. And yet his relative poverty isolated him from the wealthy mage students, of whom there were far more than non-wealthy mage students.

And, of course, the elven students, regardless of the other categories they might fit into - mage or non-mage - tended to stick to themselves as well.

Some students were brave enough, gregarious enough, to overcome those divides. Lucius barely had the desire or energy to talk to the students he most closely resembled, no matter how many pep talks his parents gave him. That did not change as he got older, as he became aware of certain girls at his school, and then occasionally of certain boys. He wanted the things he saw other people having - dates and presents and holding hands in the hall - but he wanted them distantly. The same way he wanted to be able to cast a fireball, the way mages had in the past, before magic became so rare and so weakened.

That had changed a little in college, with the introduction of alcohol. His work-study situation had been the perfect excuse to keep things casual. To dip his toes in, see what it was like, and then withdraw before any lines were crossed.

Until Ashara.

Lucius sat in one of the oak-paneled conference rooms at the Nicon Estoris Center, mindlessly filling envelopes, thinking only of her. About how she'd kissed his cheek before leaving. It hadn't been like that when their secret first started. There'd been plenty of kissing of course but it was the hot and heavy kind that happened when you came over to "watch a movie." It had progressed from there. She was frank about her inexperience and he was frank about his and so they learned together, all the way until they'd finally had sex. A first for both of them. But even then she had not clung to him or made professions of love. And she had not kissed him on the cheek before she left.

“Ridiculous,” he muttered to himself, trying to refocus on the task at hand. He was obsessing over nothing.

Ash was comfortable with their situation. He would know if she wasn’t. She wasn’t particularly good at hiding what she was feeling. And though no one was forbidding her from dating, or from dating someone who wasn’t an elf, she had plenty of reason to only want something casual. She’d come to the University of Kirkwall from the Republic of Enasan, an elf majority country in the far south. She was the daughter of two well known politicians down there - Solas and Ellana Lavellan - and she was a gifted mage and a gifted student. She was enjoying her first freedom from her parents and their relative fame (though she did always speak of them with great fondness). She was undoubtedly going to go on to great things. She didn’t need to fall in love.

She certainly didn’t need to fall in love with a twenty-three-year-old Business major who still had another semester to go after this one because he’d had to take time off part way through his degree to help out back at home in Vyrantium, who wasn’t even a particularly good or enthusiastic Business major, who had no idea what he was going to do with the degree when he was done with it.

So that was what Lucius reminded himself of over and over again. Not of the way she’d rested her forehead against his while they were having sex, or of the way she’d kissed his cheek or looked down at him with something like fear, something like hope, in her eyes. Of how impossible all of it was. Of how he’d never counted on falling in love anyway.

*

“Are we expecting more food?”

Laurence’s question cut through the fog of Ashara’s thoughts. She turned away from the door to the hallway, which she must have been watching more intently than she thought she had been.

“No.”

“Oh. Too bad.” Laurence didn’t seem too put out though. He had a plate full of pizza in front of him after all. Their other friend, Haleir, was the one who started laughing.

“Wait - did you actually ask that just because Lavellan was staring at the door?”

“Yes. She usually does that when we’re waiting for the food to arrive,” Laurence said simply, and Ashara could already feel the heat rising in her cheeks. Haleir laughed even harder at that.

“I’m not sure what’s funnier - the fact that she does stare at the door when we’re waiting for food, or the fact that you noticed and got excited.”

“Oh, shut up,” Ashara groused finally, kicking at Haleir’s chair.

“Please no destruction of furniture,” Claudia said, emerging from her room with her mountain of D&D books in her arms. “Where’s Lucius?”

Ashara pretended that the name didn’t make her sit up a little straighter.

“Running late. He had to go to work on short notice.”

“Oh. He didn’t text that, did he?” Claudia reached for her phone, frowning as she swiped through the notifications.

Ashara realized her error at once.

“No - ah - I saw him earlier today on my way to class. He told me then.”

Claudia gave Ashara one long, searching look, and then she dropped it. Haleir and Laurence were busy laughing about something else by that point, which was a relief. Ashara was no good at keeping secrets, if she was honest with herself. She was amazed this one had lasted as long as it had. Four whole months. Four great months. Free to explore and learn and enjoy college and more importantly to enjoy Lucius, the secret world between the two of them - the soft little quirk of his lips when he found something funny about a movie they were watching, because he very rarely laughed out loud - the way he melted whenever she ran her fingers up and down the back of his neck as they kissed - his ticklish spots and the tone his voice only ever took on when it was the two of them -

“Ashara.”

Haleir’s singsonging voice jerked her back. He was the only one who ever called her by her full name, since he was the only other elf in the little group they’d cobbled together over the school year.

“What?”

“What time is he getting here?”

“Oh. He didn’t say. Let me text him.”

She sent the text and then drifted on the tide of conversation as she waited for his reply, observing her friends. She and Haleir were the youngest, still in their first year at the university, and had met in their orientation; Ashara had already known Claudia through their parents’ friendship, which was why they were roommates, even though she was a year ahead of Ashara in school; Laurence, also in his second year in college, had shown up (already high on elfroot) to a party Claudia was hosting, thinking it was a dorm belonging to one of his frat brothers, and had stuck around since. And then there was Lucius, the oldest of them by a good three years, still working on finishing the last credits he needed for his degree, and painfully aware of that fact. She wanted to soothe his feelings about it, to remind him that none of them cared, that probably no one cared. She hoped he was doing okay at work. She wondered why he hadn’t texted back yet.

Claudia got to work arranging miniatures and reviewing her notes for the evening’s session, and then they were all complaining about their midterms when Lucius texted back.

Should be on my way soon. Maybe 30 minutes but then I have to take the bus. You can start without me.

A dart of disappointment hit her chest. He sounded disappointed too. Hopefully he wasn’t too tired to come after all.

“What’s wrong?” Claudia asked.

“Lucius isn’t leaving work for another 30 minutes and then he has to take the bus to get here. He said we should start without him.”

“I can roll for him,” Laurence offered.

“Nope,” Claudia said. “Same rule as always. You miss a session, you don’t get any of the XP or loot. You guys are all back in town right now, anyway. He can let us know what his wizard has been up to.”

Normally D&D was one of Ashara’s favorite parts of the week. A chance to escape from the mundane every day into a world more magical than their own - a world similar to the one her father described in every one of her childhood bedtime stories. A Thedas where magic was not a trickle but a deluge, where the beings whose skulls she saw in museums were real - dragons and varterrals and broodmothers. A world she got to study now that she was finally in college. But that evening her eyes kept drifting back to her phone, over and over and over again.

Things were casual with Lucius. Casual and secret. Both of those things were good. She was too busy for anything else. Too young for anything else.

Right?

But she hadn’t felt casual about him that afternoon, standing there looking down at him in his bed as she got ready to go to class. She hadn’t felt casual when she kissed his cheek on her way out the door.

Well, whatever her feelings were they didn’t matter. He had to protect his work-study benefits. He had no other choice. He was the first person in his family to go to college and even if she did have feelings for him it would still have to be a secret and that would probably hurt worse, and he probably didn’t even want that, and it wouldn’t be fair to put that on him, but she didn’t have feelings anyway so -

“Ash!” Laurence sounded uncharacteristically frustrated.

“Nope,” Claudia said. “Too late. She wasn’t listening and didn’t react quickly enough to help you flirt with the barkeep. He has already moved on in horror and, quite frankly, disgust.”

“What? Sorry, what did I miss?”

“Laurence has failed in his quest to successfully hit on every barkeep in town. He was hoping you would step in and roll to assist him,” Haleir snorted.

“Oh, gods, I’m sorry.”

“Ah, it’s no problem. Perhaps your character wanted to see mine fail, anyway. He is quite handsome in his new set of armor,” he said with a dramatic waggle of his eyebrows.

“If her character is anything like her, I don’t think she dates,” Haleir chimed in, a sly grin on his face.

Ashara felt the urge to argue, and then stopped herself. A secret was a secret, and they weren’t really dating, and there was no reason for that fact to make her feel sad.

“A pity in both universes, then,” Laurence sighed.

Ashara’s cheeks filled with heat.

“You would be correct. My character is a dedicated cleric of Mythal and doesn’t need any distractions.”

“And her real life counterpart?” Haleir asked.

“Not everyone is as obsessed with sex as you two,” Claudia quipped, shooting a glare at both of them.

“Thank you, Claudia.”

By the time Lucius arrived they had moved on from the subject and were heading through a tunnel they’d found in the basement of one of the bars in town, trying to see if it did in fact connect to the Deep Roads, and someone had pulled out a pack of cheap hard ciders, and Ashara was buzzy with laughter, totally removed from the confusion of the earlier part of the day. But then he was there, tall and dark-haired and quiet, and nothing else mattered other than the fact that she wanted to see him smile.

“Talvas!” Haleir crowed. “You’ve really got to quit that job.”

“I wish,” Lucius said, sitting heavily in a chair beside Laurence, accepting the cider he passed over. “What did I miss?”

They launched back into the game. All the while, Ashara wished that Lucius had come and said hi to her, that he had sat in the empty seat to her right and not next to Laurence, and most of all she wished that she didn’t wish those things.

* Lucius was surprised how many levels there were to intimacy. How many shades of difference there were in sex alone, even ignoring the other kinds of intimacy - the emotional kind, the intimacy of holding someone’s hand.

When he and Ashara had first slept together, it had been an awkward, half-drunk thing, and of course it was intimate by default because they were naked and he was inside her but that was a blunt, de facto kind of intimacy, wasn’t it?

It was nothing like the next time they slept together, two weeks after the time they’d been interrupted by the phone call from Corix.

He and Ash had been texting all day, venting their frustrations over schoolwork and parents and high expectations. He could tell even through those words that she wasn’t having a good day. She was an anxious person, and had gone to a therapist for it back in Enasan, but hadn’t found someone she liked in Kirkwall yet. He’d heard her talk about the strategies she had learned over the years to cope, and had watched how she could get so overwhelmed that she forgot to use them. So he texted her again:

Do you want to come over?

Not sure I’ll be good company.

You’re always good company.

:) omw

He was nervous the way he always was when she came over. Excited, happy nervous. But it didn’t unfold the way it usually did. There was no awkward pretense of something else before they dove eagerly into sex. There was nothing awkward about seeing her look so tired, so defeated, and wanting to soothe that away. They sat and they talked about her fears that she was in the wrong major even though it was the only thing she’d ever wanted to study, ever since she was a little girl and her magic first became apparent. How she was wondering now if it was selfish, the height of her privilege to study something so esoteric and theoretical when so many people all around Thedas needed help.

“I don’t see you that way. You went on that volunteer trip to Par Vollen for spring break, right? And you went to that protest against the gentrification of Lowtown’s historic alienage district last week.”

“Yes, but is that enough? Am I enough?”

It was natural to tilt her face back up, to look her in the eye, to say softly:

“Of course you are.”

It was natural to kiss her then, sweet and soft, and it was also the most intimate thing he’d ever done with another person. To hold her close, to hear her breath hitch not in desire but against the rush of tears. To kiss her eyelids and her nose, and then to feel her bury herself against his chest. He leaned back against the couch cushions and they lay there like that, and it was a rush as strong as that first time they’d slept together.

“Do you want to watch something?” he asked eventually. “Or get something to eat?”

“Whatever you want,” she murmured. “I’m happy like this.”

He turned on the TV for the sound of low voices but barely paid attention to what was on it, trying instead to commit to memory what it felt like to be so close to someone. So trusted. Anxiousness bubbled in the back of his own mind - this was too close, too intimate, and the closer and more intimate things got the more it would hurt to keep it secret, the harder it would be - but he kept silencing it over and over again. He wanted not to care. He wanted to be someone who didn’t have to care about these things. So he would be, at least for now.

Ash sat up eventually, bleary-eyed, her cheek creased by his shirt. She’d been sleeping and that realization filled him with a rush of emotion. They had never stayed over with one another. Had never even taken a nap together. And to see her now, when she was slowed down, yawning, vulnerable, not a whirling rush of feeling and thought -

Lucius leaned over and kissed her before he could feel or think anything else. She responded at once, soft sounds dropping from her lips, and he deepened it, and she followed suit, opening her mouth against his, threading her fingers into his hair. He pulled her closer, onto his lap. He could feel himself getting hard between them but he focused only on the way it felt to kiss her, on the present moment, because nothing else was guaranteed for them. Ashara started grinding against his leg. Everything felt slower than usual as she reached for the hem of his t-shirt, helped him pull it over his head, as she ran her hands along his shoulders and chest, still kissing him, still grinding against him. She pulled back, made long and steady eye contact with him, and suddenly there was no rush; they could make the present last forever.

“Do you want to go to my room?” he asked.

She nodded, and they went together, undressed slowly, came together on the bed naked and quiet, covered themselves up beneath the blankets, making a perfect warm secret place where there was only the two of them, and Lucius knew - knew - as he moved in her that this was too close, too intimate, that they hadn’t talked about this, that it could never go anywhere. But looking down at her beneath him, feeling her body so close to his, he could not imagine letting her go.

“Closer,” Ash said, tugging on his shoulders, and he laid down on top of her and she wrapped her arms around him and held him tight and he moved in her until all the pleasure coiled white hot in his core and he came, shuddering, not embarrassed of the sounds he made for the first time, because she was holding him, whispering something in her native tongue.

When it was over he lay beside her, not quite touching, and this time his mind was the one that was fast. Maybe - maybe this could work - it could stay a secret but it didn’t have to be meaningless anymore - maybe -

“I - I should go,” Ashara said suddenly, softly.

Lucius rolled over, saw her lying there stiff, looking up at the ceiling.

“There’s no rush,” he ventured, but Ashara was already standing up, collecting her clothes, not meeting his eyes.

“I, um - I forgot I had plans with Claudia tonight. I’m sorry. I’ll text you later?”

She was gone, and there was no good-bye kiss, and slowly but surely all the maybes in his mind drifted away.

*

Ashara had known Claudia on and off again, like a distant cousin, since she was young, but Claudia didn’t even need to know someone all that well to be able to read them like a book. And considering that people who didn’t even know Ashara could read her like a book, she probably didn’t stand a chance of hiding what she was feeling from her friend, but that didn’t stop her from trying as she unlocked the door to their dorm and slipped inside.

“There you are,” Claudia said from the couch. And then, about twenty seconds afterwards, before Ashara had a chance to get to her room. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” Ashara said, even though she felt like she hadn’t been able to breathe all day, her anxiety a vice that had started the day with its grip on her throat and had been tightening it one notch at a time ever since. It hadn’t been bad like this in a while. Was it just that the flush of excitement of starting college had worn off? Leftover stress from midterms? Why was her brain once again focused on nitpicking every last moment of every day, like a song she couldn’t turn off or ignore?

Was it because of Lucius? Because of how good he’d been at breaking down that panic in her, and how she wanted that in her life every day and couldn’t have it?

“Ash,” Claudia said, her tone equal parts warming and warning.

“No, it’s fine, really. I’ll be fine. I’m just going to go lie down for a bit.”

Except lying down made her think of Lucius again, about how she’d wanted to stay in his arms forever, about how that frightened her. About how she had no reason to be so anxious and how she really shouldn’t feel bad about anything, ever, because she was so lucky in comparison to so many others, including him. She didn’t have to work for a place she hated and disagreed with, didn’t have to give up on living her life in any particular way, just to get her degree. So really all of her self-pitying moments, all of her fear were stupid, self-indulgent, and she was a piece of shit for ever feeling bad in the first place -

And now she had let all of that fear drive her straight out of Lucius’s arms, right when things had been good, and she hadn’t even explained herself, and she’d probably hurt him, and if there was ever any chance of anything happening, she’d ruined it. And she could not just lie there with that thought sitting on her chest for hours.

So she went back out to the living room, where Claudia was watching one of her favorite fashion shows or another - probably Queer Eye for the Fereldan Guy judging by the group of well-coiffed men on screen - and sat down beside her.

“Are you going to talk about how not fine you are now?” Claudia asked, muting the TV.

“It’s just the same shit,” Ashara mumbled. “I haven’t been feeling like myself. My anxiety is getting really bad and I have no idea why. And I - did something stupid today, and now I feel even worse.”

Claudia frowned.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing - just something stupid. It doesn’t matter what. I just feel awful.”

“That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If it’s nothing, why feel awful about it? Where were you today, anyway?”

Claudia was one of the most trustworthy people Ashara knew. She would never breathe a word of this to anyone. And suddenly the secret was heavy and awful, as if one of the moons was crushing her windpipe.

“I was with Lucius. Like - with Lucius.”

“Ah, so you are dating him.”

“What - no - but how did you know?”

“Well, I didn’t know know, but I was pretty sure. You two always seemed to have a bit of a thing for each other. I just wasn’t sure why you weren’t shouting it from the rooftops if you were dating.”

Ashara was queasy with shame. Of course it had been obvious. Lucius should have chosen someone else - anyone else - to share this secret with. She was useless when it came to this sort of thing.

“Well, we aren’t dating. We’re just sleeping together. Because of his work-study. They have some stupid clause about upholding Estoris’s morals and values in public and private life.”

Claudia’s eyes widened with understanding. “Shit. Estoris was pretty conservative. So I’m guessing being romantically involved with an elf is completely off the table?”

“It’s actually being romantically involved with anyone you aren’t married to. But I doubt he would have considered an elf marriage material.”

“Lucius is totally against all of this, right?” Claudia asked, eyes narrowing.

“Yes, of course! He hates how conservative the politics are there. You should see him when he gets off of a shift. He spends hours proofreading things he doesn’t believe in and taking meeting minutes for meetings that he wishes didn’t have to happen. But you know what his family’s situation is. He has no other way to afford school, and he’s so close to finishing. So - we decided to keep it a secret. And keep it casual."

"So the stupid thing you did earlier today has something to do with all of this?"

"Yes. I was having a really rough day and he asked me to come over and we talked and cuddled and when we had sex it was - different than before. And I was so happy and then I just panicked and left and barely gave him a chance to say anything and gods I am so stupid, Claudia."

Ashara felt embarrassingly close to tears. Claudia was simply sitting there in front of her, one eyebrow delicately raised, a look of blank confusion on her face.

"So - you were having a good time, connecting with him more than usual, and then you left?"

"Yes. I mean, what other choice did I have?"

"Tell him that your feelings have changed?"

"It won't change the fact that the Center could deny his benefits."

Claudia looked off into the distance, nodding once or twice to herself.

"Let me figure that out. You just need to find out if he feels the same way."

Ashara thought back to earlier that afternoon - how Lucius had kissed her, the gentleness in his tone, the warm cozy closeness as they had sex, so different from excited experimentation or blowing off steam. And yet she still felt afraid.

"Maybe," she said. "We'll see."

Claudia put a hand on Ashara's arms.

"You could always talk to my dads, you know. They lived through some pretty shitty times in Tevinter as far as keeping love secret went."

Lying in her own bed that night, digging her nails into her palms, feeling like the whole world was spinning out from beneath her, like she was helpless and powerless no matter what she did, Ashara came back to that word. Love. She imagined the safety she felt in his arms that afternoon, and that was what pulled her into sleep, what caused her to wake up the next morning, knowing what she had to do.

*

Lucius already knew that Ashara Lavellan was fast - quick to learn, quick to laugh, quick to feel fear. In the end he shouldn't have been surprised that she would be quick to leave as well.

He'd played the moment she left the day before over and over again in his mind - how she had not even looked over her shoulder as she went. He had to remind himself that she had her own reasons for being okay with their arrangement. For wanting something easy and casual that did not tie her down or alter the dynamic with their friends. He'd panicked her with the intensity of his intimacy.

But then his mind spooled back to the softness of her voice, her words, when they had sex. How she'd held him. He hadn't imagined that.

He'd checked his phone repeatedly that morning but she hadn't texted. He tried to force himself to focus on the textbook in front of him but all he could think was how profoundly little he cared about his degree in business, about the Center and its politics, how he was barely into his twenties and already somehow totally trapped -

There was a knock at his door.

And when he opened it, Ashara was on the other side.

"Hi."

"Hi," he said, heart already in his throat.

"I'm sorry for not texting or calling I just - can I come in? It's okay if you say no."

"Of course."

She was already talking as she crossed the threshold, because Ashara Lavellan was nothing if she was not fast, quick and lively as a flash of sun on the surface of water. About how she was an idiot, and a mess, and she probably wasn't worth the trouble of dealing with what an idiot mess she was, and how she knew things had to stay secret but how Claudia had some type of plan about the Center, and Lucius was caught in the current, happy to see her, not sure he was following, unwilling to interrupt.

"The entire point is," she said, taking both his hands suddenly. "That I like you, Lucius. I don't want this to just be casual. I care about you too much for that. And I don't know if you feel the same way and it's okay if you don't -"

Lucius kissed her, not to silence her but because he didn't have any words of his own for the swelling, buoyant feeling in his chest. Because he would never have half her skill with words anyway. Because he wanted to be quick, too, to show her how he felt.

"I'd like that a lot," he said. "Figuring this out with you."

"Good," Ashara said, beaming. "Then we will."

Lucius had never felt more sure of anything in his life.

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