#shakeswriting

So I heard tumblr was popular again? Anyway, have a short Cullen and Lydia early relationship fic <3

           “Lydia?”

           She couldn’t help but giggle as Cullen hovered over her, shading her from the morning sun. He had a careless, easy smirk that didn’t mock what Josephine referred to as her outlandish behavior. Lydia owned her outlandishness, her desire to walk barefoot through the garden and lay on the grass. Once, her mother walked barefoot through the grass at Ostwick.

           “Come here,” Lydia said, thankful he wasn’t wearing his usual armor as she beckoned him to sit. He squatted and sat next to her on the grass, covertly scanning the garden to see if any of his soldiers were also rising early.

          “It doesn’t matter if anyone sees,” Lydia promised, curling closer to him. “Trust me.”

           “I trust you.”

Thorn asked again. It was the third time he asked since her shaking fingers began unbuttoning his uniform. She didn’t dawdle with the task. There was only one way she wanted Thorn’s thoughts.

“We’re married,” she said. “We are working together now.”

Though Ophélie was at the last button, Thorn put his hand over hers. He asked if this was truly what she wanted. Yes, yes, a thousand times. She wanted Thorn. Though part of her inwardly admitted it was a curious thing. She read in books that half academically interested her and half compelled her about these sorts of matters of the heart and so called “conjugal duties” before. Though not detailed about relations between two people that loved one another, the books offered a bare framework. There was that, coupled with what she managed to remember from all those talks her mother offered with unhelpful advice. All of it was theory. Thorn was a thrill to be near and something a little like home. He was real and being beside him with her fingers unbuttoning his shirt—a shirt with surprisingly bare thoughts— was too much and not enough. She felt she had to shove her head underneath a pillow and spend their wedding night as separate arks or let him consume her until the two of them merged. The latter would win. It would always win.

“Yes,” she said, still aware of her bare hands on his shirt, aware she only read his heart on his sleeve. He waited for her. He waited for longer than she had been waiting for him.

Show them to me, she asked him earlier. Was she being demanding by undressing him herself? Better to let Thorn do it. He wasn’t a man of touching and the first thing he saw to do when she told him she loved him too was tell her “no sudden movements.” He didn’t want to hurt her. She ached thinking she’d hurt him for so long, not telling him she loved him too.

She stopped unfastening. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You did want to me to show you, didn’t you? Or would you prefer we merely—”

“I want to see,” she said.

A commission for @savbakk featuring her lovely Witcher OCs Fenn and Neelke. Thank you so much for your support, love them <3 

Featuring some ropes and body worship. Rated E.

“Come here.”

           Fenn pat the bed, entreating Neelke to join him. She only smiled the faintest of smiles. Fenn made no sense as a man sometimes but made every sense in the world as a lover. When they first kissed and decided to give it a go his joy burst through the seams. When they started testing out the waters in other manners, he practically vibrated with excitement when she expressed the various activities she had in store for them. Fenn was willing to do whatever she asked. It was as if he simultaneously sought to woo her, entertain her, and obey her, in and out in the bedroom. There wasn’t a single part of him she ever expected and not a single part of him she didn’t appreciate. There wasn’t a single part she didn’t think she couldn’t love. Everything was brighter in his eyes. She was brighter in his eyes. She was sure in another life she may have been too quiet for him or too much of a logician.

            Logic however, could be a part of the bedroom. If he was too eager and too excited, he could be restrained.

My half of an art trade with @little-lightning-lavellan, I got to borrow Solas and Mellan for some library smut! Thanks for trading with me! <3

In the library Solas reads a novel on old magic lore, his fingers caressing the worn pages. He has long and nimble fingers and broad palms with small callouses from his staff. They are hands of an artist and hands that have made her his canvas.

Solas’ hands mirror his mind as he reads, capturing the words so he may have them again later. Each flip of the page is a pronounced flap, louder in the quiet of the library. He devours the words, fingers caught in the pages. If she didn’t know the full artistry of his hands she’d wish she were a book with pages for him to read. It’s reading, reading, always reading for Solas. He reads everything and everyone but especially her. Mellan knows Solas has made her one of his favorite stories. Still there are her blank pages waiting to be filled.

He knows she’s looking. Her meditation is to watch him. She likes to daydream stories of the two of them as if they haven’t promised they are each other’s grand adventures. Such a life he has lived, such a long sleep he has had with no one save his spirits in the fade. He woke to this new world and to her half-filled pages. “What are you reading there?” she asks him, because though she knows the broad idea, she wants the finer details. Solas could talk for hours on the finer details. They are the details others would skip or deem irrelevant, but he understands all idiosyncrasies coalesce into a mosaic and whole. He knows details and idiosyncrasies are what make us more human.

“According to some,” Solas says, not sitting the book down but holding the page with his thumb, “when the veil is thin, our senses are heightened.”

“Fascinating,” she says, her feet dangling off the desk she’s perched on. “Do you believe that?”

There’s a ghost of a smile, betraying his pride. “I know it.”

“Why do you read what you already know?”

There’s another ghost of a smile and more hints of his pride. “I know what I know and what it true. How others interpret it is another matter entirely. It is fascinating.”

“What else is fascinating, do you think?”

Post Tresspasser, Cullen and Lydia’s first Satinalia married. Read here on AO3

He wonders how he ever slept without Lydia. He wonders how his heart ever beat without her hand over it. Even when they eventually settle to their spots, though still near one another, he’s imprinted.

“Happy Satinalia,” she whispers in his ear before kissing his cheek, rising from her spot on the furs in their living room to rekindle the fire in the hearth with her magic. It’s been a sputtering, erratic thing since the Exalted Council. Someday soon she’ll confer with Dorian—perhaps he knows a solution working with the magisters in Tevinter. But she can still make fire, and married with a child on the way they can still make love as passionate as before, perhaps even more so, because they could have lost. Faced with what could have been lost, love is deeper. It’s surer. It’s a thousand yeses whispered in his ear when she’s underneath him and the firmer way her leg hooks and locks over his when he succumbs to the whole of her body.

When the fire is alight once more Cullen sits next to her by it, kissing her shoulder. Next year, she says, next year when we make and dress our evergreen tree for Satinalia, there will be a little one in the home. He both can’t wait and can wait. He wants to know their child and thinks he'll never be ready but mostly he can’t wait. His love has grown since Lydia. He has more to give. He has a world to give and Satinalias to share with ones he loves.

“I used to hate Satinalia.”

Though the declaration surprises him, Cullen admits he was much the same way. He used to hate Satinalia, because it was just the same as every other day. The holiday didn’t take away his ire, his paranoia, anxiety. His sadness. The day passed with snow falling from the sky and still he was the same lonely and unmovable pillar

“I was alone,” Lydia says.

He takes her hand. It is warm but still he brings it to his lips to warm it like he did the night he found her in the snow after Haven. He thinks he saw inklings of Lydia before he knew her, alone at the Circle near a gilded and grand tree. She could have been somewhere else, dancing as it snowed. Her happiness when she is happy is transcendent. He knows she doesn't like the cold. But she liked dancing in it. Cullen likes the little flurries that fall in her dark hair against ringlets of curls. They danced in the snow earlier. “The cold isn’t me,” she said, pulling him into her arms.

“But I am you,” he said.

Neither weren’t alone, both learning how to dance in the snow. Under their first Satinalia tree, they aren’t alone anymore. “You are free,” Cullen says, her hand still in his, and the word means more than it used to.

“We’re not alone anymore Cullen,” Lydia says, her thoughts his, her hand on her belly. She implores him with her eyes, touch me. Feel the little spark. She—their daughter, as they knew—was light and airy under his palm. She is like her mother already.

“Today is not like any other day,” Cullen promises. It is the first day of the rest of it all. He hasn’t been alone in a very long time. He has friends throughout Thedas and a family who drops in his home for dinner even when they have their own houses, but stew always tastes better when someone else cooks it. He’s in love with the great muse of his life, and a little more than that even.

"Happy Satinalia my love,” his wide says, kissing his cheek.

For @briarfox13 for her birthday and Christmas. Features her Saskia and Garrus during the Citadel DLC. Garrus wonders why Saskia dons his clan markings.

“You know sweetie, you don’t have to do that.”

Almost done, Saskia swipes one last stroke of paint across her cheekbone before setting down the brush for her blue paint. From the mirror attached to her vanity, her eyes meet Garrus’s. From her eyes he reads confusion. He reads a little sadness.

Oh shit.

He didn’t want that. Not at all. “Saskia—”

“Do you not like it?”

“Oh no, no of course not,” Garrus says quickly, scratching the back of his neck. He’d never want her to think that. In fact he’s damn flattered, flummoxed, and enchanted.

She wears his markings. She takes something that’s been a part of him for so long it’s faded into the fabric of his being and makes it a part of her own identity.  Blue paint and a small brush have become a permanent fixture in her cabin on the Normandy and now on her vanity in Anderson’s apartment. She can’t be without it. She doesn’t know her face without it.

It was a simple thing. It began some time ago when she first began—right after they found each other again— but he can never quite get over seeing her paint them on as artfully as if she was a born Turian. “Hey uh, sweetie,” he says however, leaning against the doorway to her room. “Are you sure you want to do that? I mean if we’re going to do that first date thing we talked about it sort of doesn’t make since…”

She turns around at her vanity, smiling at him. “I still want to do it. But I don’t feel like myself without this anymore honestly,” she says, gesturing to her markings, skillfully applied. It didn’t take her long to learn at all. He showed her how.

They found more issues for blue paint that same day.

“Saskia…”

She rises, coming to his side. On instinct he wraps his arms around her waist and draws her in. As she throws her arm around his neck they sway back and forth. It’s times like this she’s a great dancer. It’s times like this she floats across the floor, though if tonight goes the way he plans, he’ll make a good dancer out of her yet.

“I love it,” he says, tracing the markings with his finger. “It’s perfect.”

“You’re a part of me Garrus. I want the whole galaxy to know.”

She laughs as he dips her, their lips meeting and parting with more kisses in between. “You’re a part of me too,” Garrus says. “I don’t quite feel like myself without you either. Not sure how I can go back, pretend like we’re in the dark times again before we knew each other and I didn’t know how much I loved you.”

“I believe in you,” she promises with a smile, a faint blush painting her cheeks. “And hey. Once we’re alone, maybe we can find another use for blue paint. Like last night”

He stirs, gripping her hips but leaving it like that, for now. “Oh,” he says, drawing it out. “Now you’re talking. And you know, alone…” He kisses her cheek. “We can pretend like we’ve known each other a thousand years.”

Their foreheads meet. They exchange the same breath. “We have,” Saskia says. “We have.”

A piece of @tokutenshi who won my giveaway! Her OTP, Ebrisa and Cullen. NSFW. <3

If Ebrisa believed in luck before coming to Skyhold, she would have believed she carried only the bad kind. Her family disowned her after her magic manifested, and circumstances sent her to Kirkwall before she joined the Inquisition. From there, the Inquisition’s first base at Haven was beset by an ancient darkspawn magister. Beset by a dragon and an ancient darkspawn magister days after her wedding. For as long as they knew each other, time was never on their side. She wondered if time and work—a sort of work which wasn’t really work at all—would give them another addition.

She had to believe luck would be on their side in that regard.

Indisputably, Cullen believed in luck. He had a lucky charm he gave her, a coin. And indeed, the circumstances that led her to Kirkwall and the then later the two of them to the Inquisition was the same path that led them together. Because he believed, Ebrisa could believe.

That morning however proved to be a test. Cullen tossed and turned all night, accidently smacking Ebrisa during the night with his foot, though he amply apologized with kisses when she told him in the morning. It was the new recruits, hires from Orlais who had only ridiculous style. According to however Josephine they were needed in the army to keep up appearances, and Cullen detested political maneuverings. Later with the pronounced furrowed brow Ebrisa saw in his office, she assumed this day hadn’t been any better than the last. Though Ebrisa’s day had gone vastly smoother, with only the casual scarps and mends in the healer’s tower and cheeky grins from young recruits who had a few new battle scars to show off later, she staved off the thought that someday sooner than she would like there’d be more grievous injuries to mend.

Instead of thinking of that, she tried to think of Cullen. She knew certain tricks to keep him from frowning.

They were newlyweds for all intents and purposes, but they were often busy and couldn’t indulge in their newness. Due to that, their daily afternoon lunch was sacred and distinctly theirs, though sometimes soldiers flocked inside his office. It didn’t matter if the Commander and Supreme Enchanter had a designated luncheon hour. Cullen’s office was always a rotation of messengers. But because of Cullen’s dreadful previous day, because he tossed and turned in sleep, and because the knit in his brow was so pronounced during lunch, indicating another strenuous day, Ebrisa decided to lock all three doors to his office before they sat together at his desk.

a fic commissioned by the lovely @elveny featuring the lovely Adriene Shepard and Kaidan, post ME3. The two of them enjoying their first Christmas after retiring. Rated M for soft smut

Kaidan and Adriene bought the old cabin up near Lake Louise in Alberta. When they first purchased it from the elderly couple, they were warned they’d be off-grid if not for the nearby town with the appropriate tech for emergency calls and vids. It didn’t bother either of them. They loved the stars they used to call their home as they sailed on the Normandy, but they never saw the universes on earth, their home. Even staying in Canada, they saw several new universes a day.

The cabin was meant to be a small autumnal getaway, but October became November and then December. Snow dusted the mountains like powdered sugar, and Lake Louise turned into frozen blue and white marble. “Hey,” Kaidan said that day it snowed in December, holding her in his arms. “It’s Christmastime.” It was their first since coming home. To celebrate, they decided to decorate. Up in the attic the previous couple left their old felt cardinals, red and silver bulbs and other decorations. They decorated their tree together little by little and bit by bit all through December. By Christmas Eve there were three snowmen outside, a plethora of snow angels underneath fallen snow, a brass star on top of the tree, and two presents for each of them underneath.

On that Christmas Eve, after spending the afternoon on the frozen lake overlooking the mountains, they made a fire inside. Kaidan cooked a hearty stew while Adriene made sweet hot chocolate with cinnamon. Their home smelled like sweet chocolate with herbs and musky wood. They ate and then had their hot chocolate, whipped cream getting on Kaidan’s nose and resembling a white mustache. “There’s whipped cream on your nose,” Adriene said. “Let me get that for you.” He knew what she was doing. The truth was she wasn’t that slick, at least not to him, and he laughed as she gave him a bigger mustache on his upper lip before he brought her in his arms to kiss her. His kiss tasted like sweet cream and musk and Kaidan. One thing lead to another like one thing always lead to another. Like usual, they didn’t make it to the bed.