Heeey! Loved looking through your lists! I would like to prompt you with Dorian and Ironbull with "will you hold my hand?"
The Storm Coast is, quite frankly, dire. It's all rocky crags and scraggly trees like the mountain's own threadbare pubic hair, muddy from the incessant rain. It smells so strongly of brine and seaweed that his stomach nearly turns, remembering the tumultuous sea voyage that brought him south.
There's also blood in the hem of his white robe, and a creeping damp after having been out on the trail all day.
The Inquisitor and Sera have bid them farewell and hurried off towards the camp, nattering about some roguish plan for the local problem bandits they're cooking up, leaving himself and the Bull to trudge their way in their wake.
The Bull isn't very chatty right now, but looks much more cheerful than he expected, considering the events a few days prior. Dorian hasn't yet broached the subject of the Bull's new status as Tal-Vashoth, even in jest, rather thinking he said more than his piece to Gatt on that overlook.
"Dorian," the Bull says, "will you hold my hand?"
Dorian narrows his eyes at him, though the effect is rather lost, being on the Bull's blind side.
"What?"
"I think you'd like it. I'd like it."
Dorian feels himself rear back a little, ready to say something cutting and witty that the Bull will no doubt find charming, and they will decend into some small sport about it.
Only a week devoid of the Qun and you've turned into some great soppy git, I see.
Only the Bull still isn't looking at him; there is no heat to it, no challenge in it, it doesn't even feel like flirting. It brings him up short, unsure how to respond. When he does, it has hardly any of the fire he first intended.
"If we were to lose our footing on these muddy hills, we'd go tumbling down together, joined so."
"I'd catch you," the Bull says easily, still looking at the road ahead.
"And if you fell, and dragged me down with you?"
"I'd break your fall. Promise."
The Bull's promise that Dorian would always be safe was only meant to be about bedroom games, and yet; here they are, the Bull making another to him.
To the fade with safety.
Dorian slips his hand into the Bull's, huge and calloused and completely engulfing his own, his thumb brushing along Dorian's knuckles.
The Bull looks at him then, the corner of his good eye crinkled, a crooked smile with no teeth. Maker, how it feels to be regarded, rather than feeling undressed, like the Bull's gaze so often leaves him.
"You're a strange man," he offers, with no bite to it.
"You like it."
Oh, it's perhaps a little more than that.
[my fic on ao3] [my fic on tumblr] [bluesky] [prompt me]
for @thedasweekend!