First of all I want to wish you wonderful holidays and a happy new year.
I kind of unintentionally filled in the horses prompt and the third one because domestic just doesn’t sit with me if it’s not followed through with peril.
I truly hope you like this! From @yogurt-gun to @inked-drakePrompts filled:
-something with lizards? or horses!
oh, and in view of the recent events that happened in my city, something -big happen (explosion/ politic attentat) near/where dorian is away on business (in tevinter? or on a diplomatic visit somewhere?) and bull not knowing if he’s alright? but happy ending?Also, post game, I always imagined they’d have their own little hideaway.
—-
Dorian leaves in silence before the night even turns into a day, minutes away from dawn. It’s cold outside, something Bull has come to realize will be a constant in his life when it comes to Dorian, and while it’s not snowing yet, hoarfrost has settled on the ground, covering the grass in small patches.
The brown mare whose reins Dorian has in his hand snorts, hitting at the ground with its front hoof a couple of times before settling. Beside him, Dorian is bundled up in his riding furs and leathers, checking if he’d taken everything he needed for his ride back to Tevinter. It was finally the time for him too, they’d been putting it off far too long, extending Dorian’s stay. Perhaps they shouldn’t have, not if it was going to be this hard to watch him go every time, but it’s already too late and Bull doesn’t want to deal with it now.
Dorian pulls the last of his buckles taut and then he’s ready. If he were smart, he would have just climbed the damned horse and rode away, but nobody ever accused either of them of being clever when it had concerned their relationship. So no, Dorian doesn’t go to the horse, instead he walks over to Bull, letting go of the reigns, so close their toes might be touching.
Bull can feel heat radiating off of him and to his bare skin it’s a revelation and recognition. He manages not to do anything like beg him to stay though the words are somewhere in the back of his throat, jumbled and dark. The only thing he can offer in exchange is to put his hand on Dorian’s back and draw him into a hug.
By all means, it should not be as intimate as it is but with Dorian warm at his front, his hands at his sides holding just a little too hard, two warm points on his otherwise cold skin, it is.
It’s the absolute worst thing to have to let him go. Bull has to though, because it’s not his right to hold Dorian back.
Dorian sighs once Bull lets go, cradles Bull’s face in his hands and presses their foreheads together.
Bull is fairly certain Dorina says something then but the white noise in his head is too loud to recognize it and then Dorian’s pressing a soft, sweet kiss into his lips and Bull feels as if a wave is crashing over his head.
Once he opens his eyes Dorian’s already climbed onto his mare and it is once more entirely too quiet. Even the sound of the hoofs against ground when the mare turns is quiet.
.
Dorian smiles at him over his shoulder and once he starts riding, he doesn’t look back.
-
Bull already knows it’s somehow worse than he’d expected, that it always will be worse than it really is when it’s about Dorian.
The knocking on his door in the middle of the night, another one of those soundless nights where he thinks he might lose his mind, is just another sign.
He’s had a certain feeling in the back of his head since Dorian left. It appeased him to get Dorian’s letters all stamped properly. However information doesn’t travel Thedas as quickly as one would think and Tevinter likes it that way.
Bull thinks about the murmurs about Minrathous, thinks about terms ‘assassination’ and ‘magic’ and ‘cover up’, thinks about the traders and their stories, and goes to open the doors.
It all sinks in when he sees Krem’s face, grim and tired and angry, and apologetic at the same time. He understands, really, he had understood it since the moment he learned Dorian loved Tevinter as much as Tevinter hated him and that he would stop at nothing to make it better again.
But him understanding it doesn’t mean it still doesn’t hit him hard, harder than it should.
“There has been an incident.” Krem says, looking at him square in the eyes. He won’t dance around it, Bull’s sure, and for that at least he is thankful.
“Come in.” Bull says instead, and leaves the doors open as he goes to light a lamp.
The tenseness in his stance is palpable even with Bull turned away from him and once he returns, Krem is still standing by the front door.
Bull should absolutely not feel dread. He should not, he’d agreed to this, and he’s expected it. But he can’t reason with his feelings and he still feels his stomach drop when Krem says, “Someone blew up half of the Old quarter in Minrathous.”
Then, he goes on, “It happened last night. A gathering of politicians and magisters was situated there for a couple of days.” Bull already knew that, it was the reason Dorian had to leave. It was a rare and a good chance to be heard. Bull had thought it was extremely convenient way to either get assassinated or kidnapped. He didn’t think to blow up everything though.
Dorian was residing there, he should have been holding court there, Bull remembers.
Krem has probably put it together while riding to the house from reports of other Chargers. They’d probably snooped around Minrathous as much as they could, gathering information. Bull remembers Cullen had similar reports. Terse and short, emotionless, as they should be.
“And?” Bull asks instead of saying any of the other twenty questions in his head.
“It is not the first time it’s happened, just in smaller scale. Despite it, it’s treated as a separate case. There was scramble in the local militia and organisation about getting to the survivors if there were any.” Krem replies dutifully.
Ah, there it is, Bull thinks.
“Dorian’s still unaccounted.”
The panic attack that follows after he’s heard all there is about it and Krem leaves, after Bull sits in their bed and failing to calm down, is entirely expected but harder to deal with than any he’d ever had before. It’s buzzing in his head, a greyness to it all and shortness of breath that reminds him of too many bad situations in his past that only add fuel to it.
-
Rage, Bull’s found, is never a reaction to anything Dorian-related. Oh he gets angry and he gets over-protective though he doesn’t let it show. Dorian despises feeling as if things are out of his hands, if someone tries making decisions for him. Instead Bull gets panicked and after that the world he sees breaks and his focus is second to none.
He doesn’t know why as he has exactly one other time he can compare it to, and it was in the middle of the fight with Corypheus.
Bull doesn’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing that he can push his rage back in the middle of reaving to focus on someone else.
-
First, Bull thinks about it. What are the odds of Dorian being in the blast radius, what are the odds of him surviving the explosion. Depends on how drunk he was (not much, if Bull were to guess if he were in such a situation) how quick his reflexes were (very) and where he was during it.
He processes it all very thoroughly adding and removing, until there’s nothing left of Krem’s words to go though again.
Then, he deals with the loss of breath, of the panic that takes over him, anger and fear. When he can’t control his body other than hold it still so it doesn’t break anything. He deals with the fact that Dorian, apparently, is worth to him exactly as highly as his emotional reactions indicate, and he lets it be. He doesn’t have the time to doubt it, triple check it, and find holes in his psychoses that allowed such thing to happen. It’s simple really, he has grown attached to Dorian. Has made an emotional connection and now he’s suffering from it.
Bull thinks that the Qun has not completely left him if he thinks it’s suffering.
Then, he leaves the house, and goes to regroup the Chargers. He knows he has to be smart about this and no matter how much he wants to go, he can’t do much alone. It takes him a day, and another to get to Minrathous.
Bull understands that it’s too long and that by now Dorian could have been crushed under the weight of the stone beams and walls. He understands Dorian might have already dehydrated or he might have died in the fall, or had a serious injury and bled out. He understand he might have just hit his head and never woken up.
He understands that and he still rides for Minrathous and hold the fear in his chest so it doesn’t bumbled out as a scream.
He understands that he might not leave Minrathous as a whole man again and it’s not because of what Tevinters could do to him. No, he thinks it would be the most frightening thing of all, to find Dorian dead in the rubble. He’s not quite sure he would handle it well if he could handle it at all.
It doesn’t stop him because once he’s started with bad ideas under Inquisitor’s wing he just kept up with them, and really it should not have been a surprise that he’d do anything for Dorian. It just took him a while to understand.
-
In the bizarre hours between dawn and night Bull imagines he can hear sea licking at edges of the beach, moving the rocks and making a singular specific melody of rise and fall. The scent of ocean would be on his tongue and salt would be on his skin. In the background of the background, there would be the sound of waves lapping at each other, bubbling and falling over each-other.
Par-Vollen was always filled with sound, and Seheron was similar in more ways than not.
He doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to know why he thinks he hears these things, knowing he will never see the beaches again nor will he ever hear the sound of them, so specific against the cold Free Marches’ seas.
It’s like a hum really, Bull thinks. A constant that has everything to do with keeping him sane and it’s just not there.
He arrives in Minrathous and it’s night. He remembers something about extremely cold nights is tropic places, and he thinks about it again when he sees Dorian, hours later, in a healer’s tent.
-
Naturally, he goes in search of information. Dorian should have been relatively anonymous in the midst of high profile names that most likely attracted the attention of the attackers. Usually a good, now an extremely bad thing for finding information of him, especially because most people were shaken by what happened.
Somehow, with the powers of persuasion and menace he gets to the room Dorian was staying at, outside the radius. It’s empty and doesn’t look very much lived in, and even if it did it doesn’t mean Dorian was alright.
He’s not exactly sure when his methodical search turns frantic only that he feels Krem, who’s been shadowing him since the moment they stepped foot in Tevinter, pulling at his arm with a tight-grip that would have broken a bone by now.
He’s wandered into the radius blast, he realizes when he sees white tents perched everywhere for the first aid. He sees a couple of his Chargers carefully slipping in and out of the tents. There’s more than three dozen of them however. One thing they don’t tell you about Minrathous is how bloody big it is though, Bull suspects, some tents aren’t shared.
If he doesn’t find Dorian there, he thinks, he’s either swallowed by the rubble or has miraculously evaded it whole and he knows that the odds of the latter happening are astronomical. It doesn’t help that the more tents he searches and doesn’t find Dorian the pressure in his chest gets more intense until he doesn’t think he can very well function.
Someone yells from the side, and Bull turns and goes over to them. It figures it’s Krem, though he pays little attention to it when he sees Dorian perched on a cot in the healer’s tent.
-
He understands that others make it out as embarrassing, not to mention incredibly stupid, even dangerous. However there are only wounded, knocked-out people in the tent besides Dorian, and really it’s not as if he rushes Dorian. He wanted to, expected to, but the moment he sees him something in him calms and makes it all crystal clear again, the ocean calmed and turned into a fire that finally warms the rest of him. Terrifying, it’s entirely terrifying the effect Dorian has on him.
It doesn’t stop him from stepping into the tent, sweeping his eyes over Dorian for injuries, before breathing in deeply.
“Bull?” Dorian says incredulous.
Bull doesn’t quite fall to his knees as much as he lowers himself next to Dorian, collapses in on himself really, who just stares dumbly, mouth partially open.
“W-You’re here because of the explosions.” Dorian states carefully, placing his hand on Bull’s. It takes him a moment and then he says, a bit choked up, “You thought I might have been caught in the blast.”
“Yeah, yes.” Bull sighs, looking at where their hands connected and then back at Dorian.
There’s a particular expression that emerges on Dorian’s face, something not quite like despair not quite like longing but fierce nonetheless. Either way it’s there a moment before Dorian throws his legs over the cot so he can envelop Bull into a hug.
Bull sighs once more, a coil unwinding in his gut when he finally touches Dorian with both of his hands, when he feels the firmness of him, smells the perfume he uses, feels the softness of his hair under his cheek.
“I think, we should probably talk.” Dorian says after a while though still holding onto Bull.
“In a bit.” Bull says.
“Alright, in a bit.” Dorian agrees. There’s a smile in his voice, good humour surfacing with true emotions, and Bull think about never letting go.
-

