A Candle in the Darkness (A Dragon Age: Inquisition fanfiction)

What You Want

18 Guardian, 9:42

Cullen woke to the sound of Antonia and Roya's muted conversation on the other side of the room and wished, not for the first time, that he'd put a few more partitions in here when he was designing her quarters.

Not that he minded Roya, who was discreet and as fanatically loyal to Antonia as even he could ask for, but it did make it rather difficult to get out of bed when she was there. And while he'd have been fine with staying in bed, everything he wanted to do there also involved Roya no longer being in the room.

He stirred, rolling over and opening his eyes. Antonia and Roya exchanged glances, and the dwarf immediately grabbed a bag of laundry—some of it his, he noticed, with some embarrassment—and disappeared down the stairs.

"She doesn't like me."

Antonia glanced at him briefly before going back to whatever she was writing. She must have been up for a while if she'd had time to get dressed and start on her correspondence, he thought. "She likes you just fine. If she didn't, she'd find ways to make sure you knew it. Starch in your smalls, for one thing."

"Ouch. That sounds as though it would chafe."

"Probably. But then you'd be forcibly aware that she didn't like you." Antonia smiled at him. "Good morning. I thought you were going to sleep the day away."

Cullen shook his head, still amazed at how well he slept with her by his side. "I thought I might, too. It's not a problem I'm used to having." The nightmares were a fact of his life, as were the pain and the cravings, but waking to Antonia's gentle hands and soft whispers went a long way toward removing the horrors of the nightmare. He got out of the bed, tugging on his pants. At some point, he really needed to start moving more things over here, since they spent more and more nights in her quarters together—not that he was complaining. Nor was she, to his constant surprise.

She was looking up at him now, her eyes tracing the contours of his chest avidly. Cullen crossed to her side, bending to kiss her.

Antonia cupped his cheek affectionately, then turned back to her papers. Cullen started toward the fireplace to make a cup of tea, then noticed that there was one, steaming hot and apparently untouched, at the corner of Antonia's desk.

"Are you going to drink this?" he asked, lifting it to take a sip.

"No! Don't drink that!"

The urgency in her tone startled him, and he almost dropped the cup, some of the hot tea spilling onto the floor. He hastily set it down, looking at her with consternation. She wasn't usually that possessive of her food—he stole bites off her plate all the time when they ate together.

"I'm sorry—was that special tea?"

"Kind of." Her cheeks were bright red, and she had her head down, staring at the paper in her hand, which Cullen noticed with some surprise was trembling. Something about that tea had upset her.

"Antonia? What was in that?"

"Nothing. It's nothing," she said. She picked up the cup and drank the contents, grimacing as she did so.

Now that he thought about it, she regularly made faces over her first cup of tea in the morning. What was she hiding from him? Was she sick? Were there problems with the Anchor? "Antonia," he said again, more firmly. "What was in that?"

"It's just not ... something you need to drink."

"Wait, is it a ... a woman thing? Something to do with that time of the month?" He hoped that was an acceptable thing to say—there were certain ramifications to this being his first real relationship that he wasn't yet clear on. "I thought you said that was last week."