InsaneJournal

It had been a good fight, as much as a battle with goblins could ever be good.

Cullen, Cassandra, and Kili had planned a defense, and it held as best it could given the time they had to spend on it. They had lost some walls, a lot of furniture, a number of books...but no people. Despite the goblins’ numbers and greater preparation, Mount Weather had not lost a single soldier. They were battered and weary, but undeniably victorious.

Among the battered was the commander of the day, slayer of the Goblin King, Cullen Rutherford. Hawke had worked quickly to keep Cullen from bleeding to death on the field, but the goblin’s axe had cut deep. It was going to require some more work if Cullen didn’t want to lose the use of his arm. Thus he came to the Medical department and let the staff there finish putting him back together, while he tried to figure out if he was more tired or hungry.

No one had gotten much sleep in the last day or two. First they had been preparing to fight, then they had been fighting, and now everything hurt too much to sleep. The wound on Cullen’s back was the worst of his injuries, but a melee fighter took a lot of bruises, even through heavy armor...but there was much yet to be done, and now that he was stitched up Cullen thought he needed to get back on his feet and get to helping.

...in just a minute. He was just going to sit on this bed and rest his eyes a moment.

"Hey, you!"

Either he'd dozed off or Sera was light on her feet, because suddenly she was just an inch away from his face, invading his space to jar him from his rest. "There's my Commander, yeah?"

She looked awful. She still hadn't bathed, and her clothes were stained black and red with smears of blood — black from the goblins and red from Cullen and her own wounds. She smelled awful, too, but everyone was trying to clean up the aftermath of a battle and tend to injuries. As much as Sera found she liked showers, there just wasn't time.

She had a couple of clean spots where medical had gotten to her to disinfect wounds, and there was a bandage on her left arm where a sword had sliced deep, a bruise under her right eye and a cut on her bottom lip.

She also had a biscuit, which she thrust under Cullen's nose, and a mug of tea. "Got you these."

“You are my new favorite person in the world,” Cullen said with a smile that was equal parts grateful and exhausted. He looked as much a mess as Sera did, between the blood and the sweat and the ragged state of his clothes after the battle. His armor was all piled in a corner of the room, and even just a glance at it said the blacksmiths would have some extra work coming.

In the meantime, Cullen took the biscuit and the tea both. “Thank you. For this and for not letting me die in a miserable underground pit. One of those last ones might have gotten me had you not kept firing until Hawke got there.”

"I've lost enough," said Sera bluntly, grabbing a chair and pulling it over so she could sit. Her feet were aching, and something was weird with her toe. She'd heard it crunch when leaping backward, and she had a passing thought that it was a good idea to have a doctor look at it. "Not losing anyone else, not to this pish."

She picked at the bandage on her arm, sniffing irritably. "You're not so bad out there."

“We make a rather good pair,” Cullen said. “I lost track of how many we took down with that freeze-and-bash maneuver. And not one of ours dead.” That was the best thing he’d done this night, as far as he was concerned: organized a defense that held. The excitement and the glory all came in second to the fact that this hadn’t been Haven or Kirkwall all over again. He and Sera had pulled off some impressive work, though.

They'd lost too many people already. The last thing they needed was to lose more, and this was a victory they'd sorely needed.

"Feels good, yeah?" Sera smiled lightly, fidgeting in her seat. She wasn't very good at sitting still. She always had to be tapping her foot, picking at her short fingernails, ruffling her hair. "Clean it all up, take their stuff, feel good about ourselves a bit. No one messes with Mount Weather."

As happy as she was, there was a weight on her that was underneath everything she said. She was doing her best to feign enthusiasm and just be herself, but there was a hole in her heart, a piece of her missing, and she didn't like it. She didn't like sad, she didn't like lonely. She'd go home tonight to an empty bed and hold Asala's pillow, and none of this would feel like it mattered. It was shit.

Cullen knew that Sera wasn’t entirely herself. How could she be? It had been only a few weeks since her wife had vanished without a trace. That wasn’t the kind of loss anyone recovered from easily or quickly. Cullen worried about her, but he never quite knew how to address it. He and Sera were neither of them much good at having serious conversations about feelings, though they were bad at it in completely different ways. In the weeks since their friends and lovers had disappeared, Cullen had taken to trying to keep Sera occupied, because that was the only way he knew to dodge things that were too difficult or painful to think about. He had noticed that Sera had in turn taken to making sure he didn’t forget to eat.

Much as she’d done tonight, it occurred to him.

“This one, we just plain won,” he said, saluting Sera with the remaining half-a-biscuit in his hand. “How you doing? Any injuries?”

Sera pointed to the bandage on her arm, and then her face. "Nothing like you, though, getting near cut in half," she said. "All that armor makes you too heavy, Cullen, better just go in soft things." The armor, however, had likely saved Cullen's life. She wasn't going to complain about that.

"I'm all right. Bits and bruises, nothing bad. The hurt's easy to ignore."

Cullen let the comment about his armor pass with a chuckle, and answered the last of what she said with a nod. Physical hurt was easy to shut away, when you were as used to dealing with it as they all were. Sometimes hurting like this even made it easier to ignore the hurts inside.

“I had thought to help the Crafts folk with dealing with the dead. Most of this lot hasn’t ever seen this many bodies before, much less had to do anything about them. Care to come with me? We can go to the tavern and drink until we pass out afterward, which as tired as I am will be one pint.” He asked because he didn’t know how to ask if she needed a hug, or how to help, but he wanted to make her feel better somehow.

Sera pulled one foot up onto the chair and hugged her knee in close to her chest. She needed a hug, badly, and she gave one to herself to compensate for her inability to ask. "All sounds good, except for the dead bits, and the fact you got an axe in your back and shouldn't be doing any of that. Maybe think about resting. Sleeping. That's where you lie back, and you shut your eyes, and forget stuff for a few hours."

Cullen rolled his eyes. “I know what sleep is,” he informed her. And he did need sleep, but he lived in 506 and wasn’t sure if he even had a bed anymore, and at the moment being in company felt better than the silence of being alone would.

He wished Veronica were there to tease him about being a conquering hero and then make up for it by kissing him. He wished Varric were there to tell stories about the fight and make it all sound better than it actually was. He missed Asala, too - for herself, not just because Sera would be so much happier with her. Fenris and Bethany and Kallian, too, and Bull and Dorian, and for Cullen’s part, he missed Remus, as well. Mount Weather hadn’t been a bad place to be before; it was much harder to manage with so many people they cared or gone.

But he still had Sera and Cassandra, so it could be worse. If there was one thing life had taught Cullen, it was that it could always be worse.

“...maybe I’ll just try for a nap here,” Cullen said. “I will be of more use with some rest.”

"I'm staying with you," Sera declared, bringing up her other knee and hugging that one, too. "Nobody wants you stumbling around, oh, nooooo, my back hurts, I'm so tiiiiired. Get some frigging rest, right? You just won a battle."

She smiled crookedly, resting her chin on her knee. If she was grateful for anyone now, it was Cullen. He was holding all her pieces together right now, even if he didn't know it. The least she could do was try to do the same for him.

Cullen gave her a matching smile in return: tilted up on one end and with a little sadness and anxiety hiding behind it. “Wake me up if I start talking?” he requested. He nearly always talked in his sleep when he had a nightmare, and a battle like this one was exactly the sort of thing likely to set one off.

He looked over and saw the way Sera had folded in on herself. He wasn’t the best at reading people, he was starting to learn Sera. “...and give me a hug,” he added. “Before I pass out completely.”

Sera scoffed at first, offering Cullen an undignified roll of her eyes. "What, and squeeze you so hard your back gets red again? No, thank you."

But even as she said it, she was unfolding herself from her position and getting out of her chair. She sank down beside Cullen and sniffled a little, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. "But whatever," she said, and she rested her head on Cullen's shoulder, her arms slipping low around his waist so she didn't touch his back.

Cullen put his arms over her shoulders, because Sera might be tall for an elf, but she was still short next to him. He squeezed her tight in spite of his wounds--as much as he told himself that he had asked Sera for a hug for her sake, he needed it as well.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and stayed there a moment before letting go and slowly moving over to start stretching out on the bed. “And you should get some rest, too.”

She wanted to cry, and she wasn't very good at hiding her feelings when she wasn't able to just kick things over and be angry. She had tantrums when she was upset, she shouted and yelled and broke things just to feel more powerful when she felt powerless, just to prove that she wasn't going to break down and cry like someone who was weak and scared.

Hugs made her want to cry. Hugs were stupid. But she needed one more than she wanted to say.

"If it's all the same to you, I'll be getting some rest in a bed you're not in," said Sera with a forced grin. Her eyes were red. "Get it, 'cause… hmph." She gave up, lightly giving Cullen's belly a pat.

She got up and plopped pack down into the chair. "I'll be over here. You start talking, I throw my shoe."

Cullen smiled faintly, and closed his eyes. “And that is why you’re my favorite.”