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Hey, guess what I finally updated after 3 YEARS of being hopelessly stuck! It's my overly ambitious “retrieve Hawke from the Fade” fic! Here, have like 5k of Anders and Justice having a no good very bad day.
~Nuri 🕯️
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Fandom: Dragon Age
Characters: Most of the DA2 and Awakening squads plus some spirit OCs, but this chapter is Anders- and Justice-centric!
Rating: Mature
Fic Words: 11k
Ch. 3 Words: 5k
Fic Summary: Mo Hawke expected to die when she volunteered to stay in the Fade with the Nightmare. She isn’t expecting an elaborate mission set in motion by her spirit friend and carried out by a ragtag group of loved ones and complete strangers.
Ch. 3 Excerpt:
The farther into the Nightmare realm they trek, the more eerie it becomes. They haven’t travelled more than five minutes when a booming voice echoes around them. “Justice,” it sneers, “or should I say Vengeance? After all, what you did to the Kirkwall chantry did nothing to achieve justice for mages, did it? It was merely a petty act of revenge.”
Justice growls, “I am not a demon. Unlike you.”
“Is that so?” the voice rumbles back. “Did you not get here by blood magic? That seems like something a demon would do to me.”
“We…” Justice searches for words, desperate to defend himself, but he can’t find any. Fear clenches his chest. How can he know for sure? Perhaps he was a demon all along. Perhaps he was corrupted when he left the Fade. Or when he fused with Anders. Or when he blew up the Chantry. Or when he agreed to let Merrill send him here using blood magic. Perhaps…
Suddenly, he feels Anders push forward and take control of their voice.
“You shut up!” Anders shouts, not sure where to direct his voice so he just yells as loud as he can into the Fade. “Justice is not a demon! I would know better than anyone, since I’ve been sharing a body with him for the past decade! And you know it, too! You’re just saying shit to get a rise out of him.”
The voice laughs around them. “It worked, did it not? I wonder what other fun ways I can get a rise out of you?” the voice muses, then goes quiet.
“Well, that was terrible,” Anders mutters.
AO3 Link (Ch. 3): https://archiveofourown.org/works/35393581/chapters/156855154
Or Start From Ch. 1: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35393581
When The Salt Burns Your Eyes by Nuri (SpicyIsopods)
Fandom: Dragon Age
Rating: Teen
Characters: Isabela, Fenris, Zevran
Main Relationships: Zevran/Isabela/Fenris
Genre: Hurt/Comfort
Word Count: 1285
Content Warnings: Vomit, references to a nonspecific trauma related to pelvic pain
Preview:
Fenris drifts awake to the feeling of Isabela sitting up beside him. She is, to her credit, very quiet about it. But Fenris is a light sleeper even under the most ordinary of circumstances, and tonight he is wedged between two other people on a bed that was clearly not intended to fit a group of three.
Fenris doesn’t usually join Isabela and Zevran on their travels. Ordinarily he would be home in Kirkwall, but this is one of their shorter and less hazardous trips to Antiva (relatively speaking), and Zevran has been itching for so long to share his homeland with Fenris, so here they are. Packed into the captain’s quarters like a bunch of sardines, with Fenris in the middle because he is the only one who doesn’t work on this ship and is therefore the least likely to find himself scrambling out of bed in a hurry in the middle of the night.
But something tells him Isabela isn’t awake for captain’s business right now. A suspicion which is all but confirmed when he groggily reaches out to touch the small of her back and finds her shaking and drenched in sweat.
Hi and happy DADWC! I'd love to see something for the prompt "❛ no offense, but you look terrible. ❜"
I do noooot have spoons to get this up on AO3 tonight, so this is like... even more slapped together than usual, but here have some Bethany & Carver featuring me projecting my health problems onto Bethany for @dadrunkwriting!
No major content warnings that I can think of for this one. Just a T-rated chronic pain fic. Enjoy!
~Nuri
~*~*~
“No offense, but you look like crap!” Carver’s voice startles Bethany out of her half-awake stupor with a yelp, sending her temporarily abandoned woodburning project clattering to the floor from her lap.
Carver tilts his head to read it. “’If I were a bird, I know who I'd shit on,’ huh? And who would that be?”
Bethany opens her mouth to answer, but the pain radiating up from her neck is so intense that she can’t think of anything clever to say, so instead she focuses on straightening her posture and tilting her head from side to side as slowly and gently as she possibly can in hopes of convincing her neck muscles to relax even a tiny bit. They’re so tight that numbness is beginning to creep into her jaw, and her head can barely tilt to the right at all without being met with a sickening crunch.
“What’re you even doing out here in the living room at four in the morning?” Carver asks, picking her woodburning project up off the floor and gently setting it down on the coffee table beside her tool kit before plopping down next to her on the couch.
The motion jars her neck so much that she has to bite down on her tongue to keep from crying out. She takes slow, deep breaths in an effort to hold back the tears stinging at her eyes. Crying now would be a surefire way to make her pain truly unbearable for days to come. Not to mention embarassing.
“Bethy?” Carver asks, concern seeping into his voice. “Did something happen? If you need me to beat up Fiadh, I will. I bet I can take ‘em in a fight!”
She barks out a laugh that she instantly regrets when pain reverberates through her head like someone hammered a chisel into the base of her skull. “You could definitely beat Fiadh in a fight,” she replies in a whisper, “but please don’t. They’re lovely. I’m out here because my neck hurt too much to stay in bed, and I can’t exactly woodburn in the dark.”
“Isn’t sleep supposed to decrease pain, not increase it?”
“You try sleeping with a neck that turns itself into a fucking brick every time you lay down for more than ten minutes!” she snaps.
“Hey, hey, calm down.” Carver holds his hands up in a placating gesture. “I wasn’t second-guessing you. I was just telling your neck to get its act together.”
“Oh,” she replies with a sheepish smile that tugs at her ear and makes her feel a bit nauseous. “Sorry. I… haven’t really slept all night.”
“Well, guess that answers my next question, which was gonna be ‘how long have you been up?’”
“Why are you up, anyways?” she asks.
“Time for my morning run!” he responds, flexing dramatically.
Bethany responds with an unimpressed snort. Or at least, that’s her intent. What actually comes out is more of a soft huff than an actual snort, but… close enough.
“But, uh…” Carver’s demeanor softens, “if you’re bored out of your skull, I can hang around here this morning instead. I’m running errands later, which is plenty of cardio for the day.”
“I’ve got my woodburning. I’ll be fine,” she says with a yawn that feels like it’s going to pull her eardrum right out of her head.
Carver raises an eyebrow. “The woodburning you were working on by… sleepily holding it in your lap with all the tools put away on the coffee table? That woodburning? So uh… tell me, how much woodburning have you gotten done, tonight?”
“I did a little!” she defends.
“Uh-huh,” he drawls. “Well, if you wanna keep doing that for another two hours until the rest of the house starts waking up, be my guest…” He mimes preparing to stand up.
“Alright, fine,” she says with a sigh. “I wouldn’t say no to the company.”
Carver’s face breaks into a victorious grin that Bethany would be rolling her eyes at if only the slightest eye movement didn’t make her head feel ready to explode.
“Not sure what you’re planning to do now that you’re here, but welcome to the un-slumber party,” she says dryly.
“I dunno, uh… I could give you a neck massage, I guess?” he proposes.
“No.”
“No? Why no? Neck massages always help me when I’ve got a stiff neck.”
She takes slow, even breaths to suppress her frustration, but even so she can feel her neck tightening in response to it. “Yes, well, this isn’t exactly an ordinary stiff neck. As we’ve established.”
“I mean, yeah, but a massage couldn’t hurt, right?”
“Poke my neck.”
“What?”
“Poke it.”
He scrunches up his face in confusion reaches out to hover a tentative finger a few inches away from her neck. “Uh… where?”
“The back. Or the side, really. Doesn’t matter much because it’s kind of everywhere. Just poke it.”
He gives her a dubious look but does as instructed. Almost as soon as his finger makes contact, his expression transforms from skepticism to horror as he recoils in alarm. “Eugh, that feels like hundred-year-old jerky! How do you live like this?!”
“Badly!”
“Seriously, are you sure you aren’t injured? Maybe Anders should—”
“Yes, I’m sure. It gets like this all the time. At least a couple times a month. More if I’m stressed. Fiadh’s uncle, the healer one, says it’s from when—” she cuts herself off, looking down at her lap and dropping back down to a whisper, “from when I hit my head…”
It’s not exactly new information. Carver knows most of her health problems are from that one fateful day more than a decade ago when her family left her for dead while fleeing the Blight. She’s told him it’s not his fault, because it isn’t. But she knows he blames himself, anyways. So it’s not often she talks about it so directly.
She takes a shaky breath and continues, “Something about my brain not healing quite right, so now it gets confused and tells my neck to tense up until it’s practically petrified itself.”
Carver’s brow furrows as he takes all this in. After what seems like an eternity, he says, “This… really fucks up your life, huh?”
She nods. Her neck disagrees with the movement, so she has to bob her entire upper body instead of just her head.
He scowls, but when he speaks he sounds more hurt than cross, “Why don’t we ever talk about this? We used to talk about everything.”
She thinks for a long moment. Not about the answer – she knows that – but about whether she wants to answer honestly. Finally, she makes up her mind and replies quietly, “I guess it’s just… I don’t always have the energy to reassure you that it’s not your fault, you know?”
His scowl deepens. “You don’t need to reassure me. That’s a me problem. C’mon, Bethy, I wanna be a part of your life again, even if it means I have to think about hard stuff sometimes. You gotta trust me to be able to handle my own shit.”
She casts a sideways glance in his direction, unable to really turn her head enough to make eye contact. “You’re sure?”
“I couldn’t be more sure if I tried! Seriously, how many other health problems have you been sweeping under the rug to spare my feelings? Gimme the whole laundry list! Out with it!”
“If you insist,” she says with a quiet puff of laughter at his enthusiasm. “Do we want to pick a day to do some catching up, or…?”
“How about, uh… as soon as I get us some breakfast?”
“Oh! You mean out with it now, okay. I mean… sure, why not? Not like I have anything better to do. Though I don’t know how much luck I’ll have with breakfast. My face hurts too much to chew.”
“Oh, I can solve that, easy. Lemme make you a protein shake! No chewing required.” Carver beams. She has to admit, that’s a clever idea.
“Okay, okay, make me one of your weird protein drinks and then I can tell you all the fun ways my body is broken. Perfectly normal morning here in the Hawke household!”
“One protein shake, coming right up!” Carver announces, already on his way to the kitchen.
“Don’t forget my straw!” she calls after him, then flinches at the ensuing pounding in her head. Despite the pain, though, a smile creeps onto her face, because at long last things are starting to feel a little more normal with Carver.
A server we're in had a Secret Satinalia exchange over the past couple months, and now that creators have finally been revealed we can show off our creations!
I for one went uh... a little wild with the ficlet treats. Listen, I wanted to make sure as many people as possible got two gifts!! Plus, it was a nice excuse to try some new things. All but one of these features a character or relationship I've never written before! And I think I'm getting more confident in my ability to tell a story in under 500 words.
~*~*~
My Friends Think I'm Funny In The Sad Way for @liza011
Rating: Teen
Main Relationship: Zevran/Male Mahariel
Word Count: 2272
Content Warnings: Hunting/wild animal death
Summary:
Zevran doesn't know how to accept gifts. He also doesn't know how to cook over a campfire.
Wanna see the rest of our system's contributions to the exchange? You can find Haunt and Mulch's art treats here and here, and Boaty wrote a (smut) fic here!
Another fall/spooky prompt! This one is "the eyes are staring back at me." And unlike the last few, there is like… zero angst here. Just Morrigan and Kieran being cute.
Also, if anyone would like a visual, the spider in this fic is a male purple-gold jumping spider (link contains spider photos obviously)!
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Rating: General
Characters: Morrigan, Kieran
Relationships: Morrigan & Kieran
Genre: Fluff
Words: 504
Content Warnings: Prolonged focus on a (cute and friendly) spider, Pretty significant Dragon Age Origins & Inquisition spoilers
AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50618275
Fic:
“Look, Mother, another spider!” Kieran declares gleefully, pointing at the trunk of a tree on the outskirts of their campsite.
“Is that so?” Morrigan says, ambling over with a fond chuckle. “What kind have you found this time?”
“A jumping spider, like the last one. But this one is purple!”
Morrigan crouches down and peers over her son’s shoulder and sees that he has indeed found a rather spectacular purple and gold jumping spider. “’Twould appear that you are correct. You have quite an eye for spiders.”
He puffs up his chest with pride at the praise. “I like them very much! And moths.”
“So I have gathered.” Morrigan laughs. It’s a chime of genuine chime of affection and joy that she reserves for children and occasionally (if no one is listening) her partner, Ezekiel. Nothing at all like the sarcastic laugh the rest of the world hears.
“Do you think he’ll let me hold him?” Kieran asks, looking imploringly back at his mother.
“I don’t know,” she replies. “That is entirely up to him. But you are welcome to try. He poses no threat to you – the worst his bite can do is make you itch a bit. Not that he is likely to bite in the first place. Why don’t you hold your hand out and see if he deigns to climb upon it? Remember, quiet and slow or you will frighten him away.”
Keiran does as instructed, holding fingertips to the bark of the tree just below the spider. He waits there for what seems like an eternity – long enough that Morrigan’s back threatens to give out and she has to slowly lower herself into a sitting position – but eventually the little creature decides that the hand that has appeared below him is likely benign and takes a few cautious steps forward.
Kieran gasps with delight as the spider touches his fingertip with one miniscule paw, then another, then finally determines that this mysterious new surface is not here to eat him and climbs fully onto the child’s outstretched hand. “He’s beautiful,” he says, voice full of awe.
Morrigan can’t help but smile. Losing the soul of Urthemiel had done nothing to deter the boy’s love of beautiful things.
After a long moment of watching the spider, he giggles. “His eyes are staring back at me!”
“Jumping spiders are quite visual creatures, as far as spiders go,” Morrigan confirms. “’Tis difficult to determine whether it is you he is watching or something else in your general direction, but you are correct that he always seems to be watching something.”
“I love jumping spid—AH!” He screeches and falls backwards into Morrigan’s lap as the little creature springs out of his hand and past his head, disappearing into the underbrush. “He startled me! But I still love jumping spiders.”
He descends into hysterical giggles and is quickly joined by his mother, who wraps him in her arms and rocks side to side with him as they laugh together on the forest floor.
Yet another fall/spooky prompt ("a meeting with death"), which I used as an excuse to tell an important piece of Bethany's story and introduce a minor OC (Fiadh's uncle, Cormac)~
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Rating: Teen
Characters: Bethany Hawke, Cormac Ciar
Main Relationship: Bethany & Cormac
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending
Words: 570
Content Warnings: Near-death experience, vomit
AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50566441
Fic:
Bethany’s feet are already off the ground by the time she realizes what’s happening. She’s so focused on trying to set a hurlock on fire before it can launch an arrow at her mother that she’s barely aware of her own body.
That is, until Carver shouts “Bethy, no!”
Then suddenly all she can think about is her own body, which is in imminent danger of being either crushed or flung by the ogre currently holding her in its grasp. Which in turn makes her feel terribly selfish. How can she worry about herself when her family is—
CRACK.
The last thing Bethany hears before everything goes black is the sound of her own head hitting the ground. But she won’t remember that part later.
~*~*~
When she wakes up, nothing makes sense. Where is she? Where is everyone else? Why does her body barely move when she tells it to? Where did all this blood come from? It’s barely started to dry. It must be fresh.
Her head will hurt later, but not now. Right now she feels nothing at all, really. She hardly feels real as she takes stock of her circumstances with something that is simultaneously panic and complete indifference.
It doesn’t take long for her to drift off to sleep.
~*~*~
The next time she wakes up, it’s to voices right above her. Unfamiliar voices speaking a barely familiar language. The Chasind tongue, if she’s not mistaken. She’s heard enough of it in passing to recognize the way it sounds, even in her current state, but she barely speaks ten words of it on a good day. And today is most certainly not a good day.
She cracks an eye open to see who’s speaking, but the moment the light hits her eye, she shifts from being fully unaware of her body to being all too aware of it. Mostly of the splitting pain in her head and the nausea rapidly flooding her consciousness, bringing with it panic as she realizes she’s about to be sick. She grasps feebly at the stones beneath her in a futile effort to flip herself over.
One of the mystery people – a middle-aged man who appears to have been kneeling at her side – gets the hint and gently rolls her onto her side just in time for her to throw up what little was in her stomach. She’s so relieved not to be on her back that she forgets to be embarrassed about it.
“Glad to see you’re awake!” the man says, now speaking Trade. “Less glad to see further evidence of a brain injury, but we’ll take what we can get! I’m Cormac, my family’s resident healer. We’re fleeing the Blight just like I assume you are – would you be interested in some company and, more importantly, some medical attention?”
Relief washes over Bethany, followed almost immediately by overwhelming guilt as she realizes that not just this man, but his entire family are wasting precious time trying to help her.
For a moment she wants to say no. Tell them to go on without her, that she’s not worth risking their lives over. But then she realizes they’ve already risked their lives for her, so she might as well make it worth their while.
And besides. There’s some little spark within her that doesn’t want to die today.
So she gathers all her meager strength and replies with a half-delirious “uh-huh.”
Breathe It In And Let It Out by Nuri (SpicyIsopods)
This one's another fall/spooky prompt ("a ghost living in a mirror"), tho it got uh… wildly out of hand because Fiadh walked into the room and brought an unexpected genre shift with them, haha.
Some context for this one because it's... wildly canon-divergent: In this timeline, the Hawkes thought Bethany was dead after the ogre incident, but just after they left she was rescued by a local Chasind clan also fleeing the Blight. As of this fic, Bethany still (falsely) believes the rest of her family died in the Blight. They did not. Her siblings are very much still alive. Her mom is… not, but for unrelated reasons.
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Rating: Explicit
Characters: Bethany, Fiadh
Relationships: Bethany/Fiadh
Genre: Angst that quickly morphs into Fluffy Smut
Content Warnings: Themes relating to grief/presumed family death, explicit sex with some vaguely kinky undertones
Words: 1851
AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50664370
Fic:
Bethany’s not sure what possessed her to pull out the hand mirror. Nerves about her rapidly-approaching wedding, perhaps? Though she’s not sure what good staring blankly at her own face will do on that front.
Whatever the reason, she’s now seated on the edge of the bed with a mirror clutched tightly in her hands, inspecting her own visage for… what? Evidence that she’s real? That she’s alive? That she’s deserving of good things?
Whatever it is she’s looking for, she can’t seem to find it. She sees her face, sure. She has her father and sister’s skin, her mother’s nose, her brother’s hair… but that isn’t her. That’s just the ghost of all the family members she’s lost.
But as hard as she tries, she can’t seem to find herself in the mirror. Not in any way that matters. And any attempts she makes just leave her feeling lightheaded. The more she tries, the less real she feels, until eventually she can no longer even feel her own hands as they grip the mirror.
She hardly hears Fiadh enter the room. Hardly feels the mattress move as they climb into bed behind her. But it’s hard to ignore the comforting weight of them against her back. The sight of their face in the mirror as they bend down to kiss her shoulder before resting their chin there.
“You alright, love?” they ask, caressing her bicep. The sensation is dulled, but it still serves to bring her back to her body a bit.
“I…” she desperately searches for words. She wants to explain. She does! But the words just aren’t there. Instead, there’s just agonizing emptiness. Frustration and panic swell in her chest and she can feel sweat beginning to soak into her clothes.
“Take your time,” Fiadh murmurs.
Bethany takes a deep breath to quell her rising panic and closes her eyes. She knows the words will come faster if she’s calm, but actually becoming calm is easier said than done.
It takes some time, but the words do eventually come. “Sometimes… seeing myself in mirrors feels strange. Almost like a piece of me died every time I lost a family member, and now the person in the mirror is just a ghost.”
Fiadh’s brow furrows for a moment, but then a goofy grin spreads across their face and they bury their face in her shoulder, nuzzling as vigorously as they can without giving both of them a headache. “Could I do this to a ghost?”
It’s such an utterly silly response that it works. Bethany bursts into hysterical giggles.
Once her giggles die down, Fiadh gently plucks the mirror from her hands, lays it facedown on the bedside table, and then presses an achingly tender kiss to her neck. "What about that? Could I do that to a ghost?"
"Oh!" she gasps, a tingle running down her very much alive spine. “Um… no, I don’t imagine you could.”
“Didn’t think so,” they murmur before pressing another kiss to her neck. This time they part their lips just slightly so they can mouth at the sensitive skin.
Suddenly a particular part of her is feeling very alive. Enough so that a thin whine escapes her throat without her permission. She claps a hand over her mouth instinctively.
“How’s this? This helping, or d’you want me to stop?” they ask.
“It’s… it’s helping,” she admits, lowering her hand from her mouth. “Are… do you want this?”
“Now why would I initiate something I don’t want?” they ask with a soft chuckle.
Bethany laughs nervously. “Okay, fair point. Um… are we… do you…”
“Sex. I’m initiating sex. In case that wasn’t clear,” they clarify with a far less nervous laugh of their own. “Uh… probably very lazy sex, since my everything hurts today. But that’s fine, lazy sex is still fun!”
Bethany relaxes a bit, reassured that they’re on the same page. “Okay. I… I want that. That sounds nice.”
“Alright then,” they press a chaste kiss to her shoulder as they snake their hands around to her belly. “Could I doooo…” one hand finds its way up to cup her breast, lightly grazing their fingertips over her nipple through the fabric of her nightgown, “this to a ghost?” They punctuate the question with another open-mouthed kiss to her neck.
Her hand flies back up to her mouth to muffle the moan that escapes her throat.
“See? Being alive feels good, right?” They slide their other hand down to rest on her thigh, tantalizingly close to her core.
She gives a little nod, accompanied by a muffled noise of agreement. It’s hard to disagree with that statement when she can feel herself soaking through her smallclothes already.
“And you deserve to feel good.” They nuzzle under her scarf and suck at the skin there, hard enough to leave a mark where no one else will see it. “I want you to feel good.”
She lets out another muffled moan.
“I love your sounds. You don’t have to hide them, you know.”
She makes a flustered noise through her hand, heat rising in her cheeks. But then, slowly but not reluctantly, she lowers her hand.
“There we are,” they say, circling her nipple with a finger and earning a newly-unmuffled whimper from her. “Now, let me see…” They tug her nightgown up to reveal her now visibly soaked smallclothes. “Could I do this to a ghost?” They cup a hand over her core and tease at her entrance through the wet fabric.
She arches her back and lets herself moan. She doesn’t bother adding words to her answer. She figures she’s gotten her point across.
Her clit is hard enough that they can easily find it even through her smallclothes, which is exactly what they do. “And what about this?” they ask softly, circling her clit a few times with a teasing finger before pulling away. “Could I do that to a ghost?”
She whines loudly, ignoring the actual question in favor of begging them to please keep going.
And so they do. When they start again, they also begin teasing at her nipple to the same rhythm, and the effect is dizzying. She’s really quite glad they don’t bother with removing her smallclothes – she suspects she’s far too sensitive now to enjoy the experience without them. But the cloth barrier dulls the sensation just the right amount, leaving her gasping and writhing and begging them to keep going.
And then before she knows it, she’s seeing stars as she comes without so much as taking off her clothes.
Once she starts twitching from overstimulation, Fiadh withdraws their hands and begins smoothing them up and down her sides instead as they pepper chaste kisses all over her shoulder and what they can reach of her cheek. “Did that help?” they ask once her breathing has mostly evened back out.
“So much,” she pants. “Thank you. Do you… do you want anything?”
“Only if it sounds nice to you,” they reply.
She snorts. “You’re as bad as I am! Do you want anything? I’m offering.”
They laugh. “I do, yeah,” they admit, suddenly a bit bashful.
“The usual ‘everything hurts today’ position?” she asks.
“How’d you guess?” They laugh, bashfulness gone as quickly as it arrived.
“Just a hunch,” she says. “Alright, give me a moment to get situated.”
They do as they’re told, sliding off the bed so they can rid themselves of their clothes as Bethany rearranges the pillows at the head of the bed and props herself up against them.
Once she’s ready, she pats the bed to summon her now-undressed partner to join her. They do so, quite eagerly, and proceed to straddle her, grabbing onto the headboard of the bed for support as Bethany smooths her hands reverently up and down their thighs before sweeping them up to knead at the fat just above their hips.
“You’re very soft, you know,” she says. Well… most of them is, at least. She eyes their cock, which is already quite hard, its head poking out of its hood before she’s so much as touched it. But she keeps that thought to herself. Not because she thinks they wouldn’t appreciate the innuendo, but because she’s fairly certain she’d die of embarrassment trying to deliver it.
“I’ve been told that a time or two before,” they respond, grinning down at her like an excited puppy.
She giggles, then grips their hips and looks up at them. “Ready?”
They nod so eagerly that the mattress shifts beneath them, which does nothing to dissuade her impression of them as a puppy. Suddenly she desperately wants to call them puppy. But… she doesn’t have it in her to try out something new right now. Especially when right now she’s not quite sure if the something in question is just a nickname or something more. Some other day, perhaps.
For now, she uses her grip on their hips to draw them closer so she can press a kiss to the place where their hip meets their groin. Then another to the side of their cock. She feels it twitch slightly at the touch. Which isn’t quite enough to wake her own sex drive back up, but it certainly makes warmth bloom in her belly.
Fiadh is quiet, but she doesn’t worry too much about that. They often get quiet during moments like this. One look up at them reveals that they’re still beaming expectantly, so she flattens her tongue and runs it along the underside of their cock, making their breath hitch as she does so.
She tries for a moment to swirl her tongue around the head of their cock, but their hips keep twitching, making such a delicate movement difficult. So after a few tries, she gives up in favor of taking their whole cock into her mouth and loosening her grip on their hips so they can properly thrust. And thrusting is exactly what they do.
She likes doing this. Going down on Fiadh. Likes the feel of their cock in her mouth. Likes that it’s short enough that she can reach her tongue back to tease their entrance and taste their slick but long enough for her to feel the weight and slide of their it against her tongue.
As her partner’s breathing grows heavier. As their thrusts grow more erratic. As their slick drenches her chin. She realizes that this, too, is a way to feel alive.
Fiadh doesn’t last much longer than Bethany did. They reach down to clumsily pet her hair as they finish with a quiet, shuddering moan. Their thighs are shaking so hard that she’s worried they’ll fall over, so she gently lowers them into her lap and pulls them against her chest as best she can considering they’re taller than she is.
“How was that?” she asks.
“Good,” they reply, quietly but emphatically.
“I’m glad,” she presses a kiss to whatever body part she can reach in their current configuration, which turns out to be a bicep.
Another spooky/fall prompt! This one's "footsteps that follow wherever you go." I also pulled a lot of inspiration from the song Every Time by The Last Bison. <3
Context Note: in this timeline, Morrigan and Ezekiel have an adopted dragonling daughter named Aednat.
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Rating: General
Characters: Ezekiel Surana, Morrigan (and briefly their kiddos)
Relationships: Morrigan/Ezekiel
Genre: Fluff
Content Warnings: Dragon Age Origins Spoilers
Words: 437
AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34368964/chapters/128015809
Fic:
“Remember how I used to get cross at you for following me everywhere?” Morrigan muses.
Ezekiel giggles and nods.
It had stung a bit at the time, but those days are long gone now. There’s enough distance between then and now that they can laugh about it together as they watch their children play in the early morning light. Kieran has recently learned to make snowballs with his magic, and Aednat is having a great deal of fun slapping them out of the air with her tail.
“In hindsight, I am glad you did,” Morrigan continues. “’Twould be a shame for us to miss out on… this.” She gestures vaguely at Kieran and Aednat. At herself and Ezekiel.
“Being family?” Ezekiel signs.
Morrigan chuckles fondly. “Yes. That.” She pauses a moment, then adds, “You always have been a stubborn one. Are you aware of that?”
He beams and signs “I try.”
She huffs. “Remember that first year, camping? Every night, I would set up camp as far away as I possibly could. And every night you would come find me, despite my being thoroughly unpleasant to you. At the start. I hardly knew any sign at the beginning, either, so you went to all the trouble to bring over paper so you could write little messages. ‘Twas infuriating at the time, but I… find myself feeling rather grateful for it, now.”
Ezekiel just smiles and bumps his shoulder against hers.
“And exploring…” she snorts. “Everywhere I went, your footsteps seemed to follow. No matter how far I strayed from your own goals.”
“Safety in numbers!” he signs.
“Fair enough. However, you had safety in numbers already. ‘Twas I who was foolhardy enough to wander off alone. It… was welcome company. But why?” She tilts her head, brow furrowing.
“Your safety!” he insists. “Besides. Was curious. Wanted to know more about you.”
She huffs indignantly, but a small smile gives away her true thoughts on the matter. “And then… you came and found me at the eluvian. I…” she fidgets slightly, “…am glad that you did. I am glad that you waited. That you gave me space. However, I am glad that you followed me eventually. I do not regret bringing you with me. I hope that you know that.”
“I know,” he signs, grinning, before flinging himself at her and knocking her backwards into the grass with the force of his hug.
She makes an indignant noise, but wraps her arms around him nonetheless. “You, my dear warden, are an utterly infuriating person,” she says with laughter in her voice, “and I am endlessly grateful for it.”
