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He’d come to him at his lowest point, an offer of support, of respite. The city burned and the Gallows with it, though one in flames and the other in his own guilt. Most days Cullen felt like just another crumbling pillar, new cracks and fissures opened by the moment, as the weight of it all bore down on his shoulders alone. But the nights were worse. Sequestered in his cell with his demons, which stubbornly followed in the half-waking that was his existence. He accepted his penance in silence, it was his due- silence for silence. It would never be enough but he would pay it.
Bones groaned and creaked as much as the frame of his bunk as he settled, the sun long since set casting the unwelcoming space in deep shadow. He wouldn’t sleep, not yet, he rarely did, but this afforded him more rest than the measly hours of oblivion that overtook him every few days.
His armour stacked neatly on its rack, his clothing an untidy pile on the floor. Carvers own beside them. He felt the familiar weight settle over his own . Exhausted, he’d traversed days and duty in a fog that wouldn’t shift however the wind from the bay blew. The reins of control gripped tight in numb hands still slipped, inch by crawling inch. It was only when his grip was near to faltering, as he clung to the last desperate length, that came that offer of peace- or the shade of it.
Cullen was beyond weary, but duty had ever been that way for him, and he held on with stubborn purpose for purposes sake. Until he couldn’t any longer. It had been nearly a week since the last, worn down to the nub, his resolve littered like so much ash on the flagstones of his chambers- that’s when he came. When he couldn’t say no. When he no longer wanted to.
At first it was a simple need- overworked muscles and a brain too tired to think were a poor excuse for failure. And there was always a need to be ready for combat these days. Kirkwall swarmed with opportunists, the dregs from the sewers and worse risen to the surface, like so much flotsam on the flood of blood and ash as the city haemorrhaged. It wouldn’t do for the Knight-Captain to drop his sword.
And so he’d come, and he worked the tired and torn muscles, pushing feeling back into them on the heels of pain. The pain was no stranger, but the touch of the other more so. It’d been an age since he’d allowed himself to be touched outside of battle. But he couldn’t deny this pain was restorative rather than destructive. This pain reminded his body it was alive still, and less welcome the reminder to himself. And always that others more deserving were not. Yet more penance, and more silence.
What began with probing fingers, prying apart clenched sinews and tenderising seized muscle, forcing him back into some semblance of functionability, became another sort of probing.
Carver had grown bold over time.
Cullen had allowed it.
On his stomach on his slab of a bed, hips propped with a rolled towel, his Lieutenant took his payment from Cullen even as he gave. Cullen never came. It never mattered. In the rhythmic motion of the other man at his back, at the now familiar stretch and burn he found a modicum of peace. If not peace, at least a stillness he found nowhere else. Not since his boyhood, on bended knee before the rusted and imperfect likeness of Andraste. That, along with his boyish purity and the now nameless stretch of blighted earth he’d called home, survived only in his memory. The benediction of his prophet just as absent in the wake of his sins, as Honnleath in the wake of the horde. Hazed and distorted by time and torment the recollection was as imperfect as that statue, his intentions just as empty, and as absent his soul.
He felt the hot rush of Carvers release, slamming his thoughts back into his body just as Caver did. Too soon, it was always too soon, too temporary the freeing drift of consciousness. His need to be other too well matched to Carvers need for the same. The brief moments of rest, the press of weight across his back, the gradually slowing puff of breath by his ear signalled the end of that momentary reprieve. But Cullen couldn’t regret it. Tonight he’d sleep, deep and dark and undreaming. And tomorrow he’d press on until the next time, until his body and his mind fractured under the strain and he’d have no will left to either deny or acquiesce. Then, Carver would come again. And he’d know at least an illusion of peace, however short, and it would buy his silence for a few days more.