It’s pitch-dark at first, between them and around them. But Garrett’s too used to catching what they both need in such gloom. He also learned to light a candle without touching it – just with a single movement of his hand.
There are footsteps behind. The footsteps of a warrior who tries to be quiet but is not ashamed of who he is. He wants not to wake him up, but Garrett doesn’t sleep anyway – he couldn’t fall asleep alone, just sat and waited. There is the only candle next to the bed – to leave a landmark in the dark, but not to burn with a flame.
Garrett doesn’t turn around, feeling the bed sag a little behind him. A hand touches his open shoulder: warm, humanly large, with traces of calluses descending. He has fought and fights a lot, immersed in battles up to the top of his head… but along Garrett’s spine, his fingers run so carefully, outlining a long, branched scar, that the breath stops in the throat. More than once, Garrett convinced that there was no need to remake his personality and try to be somehow different – and his words were understood. But… he himself is like that. An interweaving of the hardness of steel and the vulnerability of a still fragile core. An inevitable strike in the thick of the fight – and a cautious, as if questioning touch in private.
He never calls him Hawke. Only…
When he spoke like that, calmly, muffled, Garrett wanted to drown in his voice, like in a deep river. And he sinks again, throwing his head to his shoulder, leaning back and feeling the broad chest, still covered by the fabric of the shirt.
The first kiss touches the base of the neck, the second leads up, under the jaw, under the ear. Without looking, Garrett reaches behind his head, lacing his fingers through smooth locks of hair that are a little softer than his own. A second warm hand slides along his side, and Garrett covers it with his own. Fingertips touch, intertwining, skin to skin.
An intermittent exhalation over his shoulder: he understands everything. They know each other better than anyone else could, having grown into each other’s hearts with gnarled roots stronger than Kirkwall’s slave chains and corrupted underground blades. Therefore, turning around, Garrett knows exactly what to do: to intercept the edge of the shirt, which Carver hastily pulls off, helping, throwing off the extra clothes from the bed, and look into the piercing blue eyes.
’Fought enough?’ the whisper is more affectionate than sarcastic. ’I missed you’.
He does not wait for an answer. He leans forward and takes it like that, right from the lips that open towards him.
Garrett knows it’s pitch-dark, and the Maker, Andraste, and even the Tevinter Black Divine himself turn away from them at such moments. But for the umpteenth time he is lost in the moment with Carver, feeling that he did nothing more right in his life, and he does not care about someone else’s opinion about it at all.
His brother, whispering on his lips that he missed him too, doesn’t seem to care either.
