log: dean+dorian WHO: Dean Winchester + Dorian Pavus WHEN: April 29, during the day WHERE: Asala's office WHAT: Dean comes by Asala's office to thank her for helping to save Castiel and trap Lucifer in the Fade. Asala's not there, but her assistant is. Dorian helped with the Cage, briefly, but until now they haven't talked much. Turns out, they have far more in common than they realize. WARNINGS: Feelings, discussion of sex and terrible parenting
_________________
Adaar had resigned her place as Councilor, but she still had an office and a secretary in Command thanks to her military position, so that was where Dean went when he wanted to talk to her. The negotiations were still going on for the Grounder crap (none of which Dean paid attention to), and he wasn’t sure when she would be out, so he took a gamble while Cas was asleep and went up to Command alone.
He had only just gotten comfortable leaving Cas alone for more than a minute or two to hit the john. He was too paranoid he’d come back to Lucifer at the driver’s seat. But it had been about a week of watching Cas go to bed and wake up as the right person, a week of letting him follow Dean around while he worked in Infrastructure to keep each other in their lines of sight, and everything seemed… normal. Normal-ish.
Dean had left a note and wouldn’t be gone that long, anyway.
People were still in their meetings when he went up there, leaving the Command offices uncomfortably quiet. Still, Dean looked into Adaar’s, unsurprised but a little disappointed to find that the only person there was her assistant, Dorian.
He’d met Dorian. A few times, actually, while he was working on the wards and the Cage with Gabriel. They hadn’t had a conversation, though. Dean hadn’t really been up to it at the time, so he was a little awkward, unsure of how familiar to act, when he said, “Uh, hey. Any idea when Adaar’s coming back?”
Dorian was Adaar's assistant, but he'd largely taken over the desk for his own personal affairs, as his work assisting was somewhat limited. He had projects, one project in particular, and it involved reverse-engineering rather complex magic with an ancient elven artifact. It meant the desk was something of a well-organized mess at this point, and with his work done for the time being he had the orb out and was scribbling down notes in an alphabet that Dean wouldn't have recognized. Intricate diagrams were pinned to the bulletin board and Dorian kept glancing over at them, squinting, before scribbling again.
When Dean spoke, he paused, and he laid a hand over the orb like he was about to take it away and tuck it in a drawer.
"Dean, hello." Familiar, but not overly so. He glanced at the clock (clocks were rare in Thedas and only dwarves found them to be of any practical use, specifically because they lived underground). "I'm not sure, but it shouldn't be long. You're more than welcome to wait here if you like."
Dean didn’t know what to do with Dorian. They were literally from two different worlds, but he got other people from their reality in a way he didn’t get Dorian. Maybe it was the attitude or the clothes (was that a shirt or just a series of belts?), but the last time he’d seen someone like Dorian Pavus at home, he’d been getting a contact high in a gay bar.
For a job. Obviously.
“Don’t know if I should hang around,” Dean said, shrugging with one shoulder. “It’s not that important. I just wanted to give her an update on Cas and thank her.” He paused, then added, “You too. For what you did. We owe you.”
Dorian nodded in acknowledgment. He had a small role to play in all of this, but he'd helped at Adaar's request when it came to reconciling Gabriel's angel wards with the nature of the Fade. It was precisely the sort of complex magical project that Dorian could sink his teeth into.
"How is Cas?" he asked solemnly.
“Uh. Tired.” Dean chuckled. “Hungry. Bitches every time he has to do something inconvenient. He wasn’t human for that long before, he’s not used to it. He asleep now.” It was only mid-afternoon. “But, you know, in his right mind. Alone. He’s about as good as we’d have hoped.”
Dorian smiled. "Good! I'm glad to hear it." He'd been afraid to ask. "At home, there's rarely any hope for an abomination," he said. "Someone becomes possessed, and the only way to deal with it is to kill the person. I'm pleased that didn't have to happen in this case."
“That’s usually the case for us, too, but the three of us have a habit of getting around the rules.” Dean shoved his hands in his pockets, his shoulders uncomfortably hunched, like he was trying to look shorter. “But, uh. Glad we all made it back in time. Another couple days and Cas would’ve been dead.”
Dorian leaned back in his chair. Unlike Dean, he didn't hunch at all. He kept his spine long and his chin high, like he was some sort of preening peacock in his fine silks. It was green silk today, with teal velvet, with intricate embroidery of a snake winding its way up his back to his shoulder.
"In that case, I'm glad we all returned from Storybrooke when we did," he said. "Terribly inconvenient, that."
“Yeah, I don’t have to guess how you dealt with it.” Dean’s expression was somewhere between delighted and horrified, like he was remembering a very skilled contortionist. “Not to come down on it, if I could cope with all the weird crap in my life by screwing someone before I had time to think, I’d do it.”
"Yes, well." Dorian sat forward again so he could stack the papers that were spread out on his desk. "I've spent a lot of time learning not to be ashamed of myself, and I don't appreciate some sort of magic attempting to play with that."
“Yeah, that’s… a bitch.” Dean felt like he should have more to say, but anything that felt like solidarity was caught in the back of his throat. “Never thought the goddamn apocalypse would look like an improvement, right?”
Dorian rested his elbows on the desk, lacing his fingers. "It is, in some respects," he said. "I lack my family's elegant Qarinus estate on the coast and all of the trappings of nobility, but on the up side, the assassination attempts are infrequent and I'm allowed to be with my lover without anyone batting an eyelash."
“More money, more problems. You’re probably better off without all the extra junk, anyway.” Not that Dean had any reason to care about Dorian’s titles or his money (or even really wrap his head around what that meant where Dorian was from), but it seemed like the right thing to say. “But you and, what’s his name, Bull? You’re good now?”
"Bull, yes. The Iron Bull, if you want to be formal about it." Dorian smiled crookedly, resting his chin on his hands. "Yes, we're good."
“You don’t really call him The Iron Bull when you’re doing it, do you?” Dean asked impulsively. “Because I’ve shouted some weird shit in my day, but that’s just too many syllables.”
Dorian raised his eyebrows, amused. "I call him a lot of things," he said.
Dean straightened up, as if he found a sudden need to be defensive. “Sorry, that was rude.”
"It was, but I happen to have alarmingly thick skin." Dorian glanced at his arms, then stretched them out in front of him. He had an elaborate red tattoo winding up his left forearm, geometric triangles and curves that looked like they meant something. "And exquisitely smooth, beautifully-colored skin, while we're at it."
Dean’s gaze was naturally drawn over Dorian’s arm, trying to place the design. He had a better memory for symbols than he let on, and some of it looked familiar, but it was nothing he could pick out.
And it was easier to stare at Dorian’s tattoo than it was to actually look at the rest of him. The room felt smaller than it was, the air staler than usual, and Dean had the vague sense that he was on the verge of being in trouble for… something.
“Yeah, I guess we can’t all be that lucky.”
Dorian pulled his arms back, leaning back in the chair again. "Am I making you uncomfortable?" he asked, somewhat surprised. He knew he came off as a bit bombastic at times, and he was flirtatious and arrogant with just about everyone. It didn't settle well with some people.
“No,” Dean said automatically. “Not at all. You do you.”
Dorian's smile was a little gentler. "To answer your question, no, I rarely call him 'The Iron Bull' in bed."
Dean shot a quick look back at the door before he actually moved a bit closer, taking a seat in an empty chair in front of the desk, having apparently decided to wait for Adaar herself. “Half the people from your reality are, you know, not straight. Figured it wouldn’t be a big deal just looking at all of you.”
Dorian stared at him for a moment, like he was trying to work out what Dean meant, or that he was waiting for Dean to explain. "Not 'straight'?"
Dean paused, trying to think of a way to explain it that didn’t involve saying gay, because he probably wouldn’t know what that meant, either. Eventually, he decided to be blunt: “You don’t sleep with women. Or more than just women.”
"No, I don't sleep with women," said Dorian. "I prefer the company of men. One particular man, at the moment. The same is true for you, yes?"
“I sleep with women,” Dean replied, more kneejerk than he meant it. He’d been here for over a year, had been with Cas for most of that, and it was stupid to be so nervy admitting it when it wasn’t actually a secret. “Just not right now.” Cough. “Clearly.”
Dorian shrugged a shoulder. "It's the same for Bull."
“So… you and Bull, Sera and Adaar, Hawke and the guy that glows, I’m guessing some other people. Is there something in the water where you come from or do people just not care?”
Dorian didn't answer immediately. He crossed his legs, lightly drumming his fingers against his knee. "That's a general sort of question," he said. "Thedas is a large place, with several countries and cultures, and certain classes and castes and societal structures."
Dean frowned. He knew he’d heard Dorian make a reference to people not liking his choice in partner, he hadn’t made that up, and he was torn between being confused and just plain indignant on Dorian’s behalf. “Then what about wherever you’re from?”
Again, Dorian paused. The question was somewhat unexpected, and Dorian hadn't planned on having feelings today.
"In Tevinter, there are certain expectations placed upon the son of a noble house," he said. "Every noble parent pours all of their hopes and dreams into their children, expecting to distill all of the ideal qualities of a Tevinter mage into an heir. Perfection, yes? Intelligence, good looks, and exceptional magical ability."
Dorian briefly gestured to himself. "I have all three of these things, and no desire to play by the rules."
“So they’re just pissed that you and that mountain can’t have kids.” Dean sat back in his chair and grimaced. “Screw ‘em.”
"Well, no," said Dorian, "now they're not pissed about anything, because they're dead." He sorely wished he had a glass of wine. "But were they alive, I'm sure they'd be horrified."
He smiled bitterly and gave a dramatic little shiver. "We 'Vints' and the Qunari have been at war for centuries. Oh, how they'd hate it."
That, Dean could appreciate. He couldn’t help but smile at it. Dorian clearly loved his boyfriend rather than just shacking up with him to piss off his parents, and Dean appreciated an effective fuck you when he saw one, too.
“Guess that’s one way to stop fighting.” And then, after considering it for a couple seconds: “Other angels aren’t exactly cool with Cas getting down and dirty with a human.”
Dorian had little understanding of what an angel was to Dean, but he accepted that Castiel wasn't a demon even if he seemed to operate in much the same way. "I imagine they might find it distasteful, and vice versa?" he asked idly.
“Kind of? Most humans have never seen one. A lot don’t admit they even exist. But angels are…” How did you go about explaining angels to someone from a world where they weren’t a thing? “They’re dicks,” he decided. “Came around before humans did. Most of them think of us like, I don’t know, monkeys or cattle or something.”
"In Tevinter, we refer to the Qunari as ox-men on a regular basis," said Dorian with a twitch of a smile.
“Hey, at least you can’t blow up Qunari with your brain. ...I assume.”
Dorian wiggled his fingers and they crackled with electricity. "Perhaps not in that precise way," he said.
He took a moment to consider how much more he wanted to say. He didn't know Dean, but he got the sense that Dean was curious. After experiencing another life in Storybrooke, in a world that he believed was far more like Dean's than his own, he had to think that Dean hadn't found much acceptance for his choice of lover.
"My father never knew about Bull," he said, glancing at his fingernails. "I stopped speaking to him years before he was assassinated."
Dean resettled, his expression falling into sympathy. “How long has he been gone, if you don’t mind my asking?”
"A year and a half, perhaps? But we hadn't spoken in some time. One conversation in Redcliffe because he decided to trick me and insist I was only going to be meeting a family representative, and before that I hadn't seen him since leaving Tevinter." There was a weight, a sadness to Dorian's voice, even if he was making a show of absently picking at his nails and adjusting the rings he wore.
You didn’t have to be good at reading people to see that it was a sensitive subject for Dorian, but Dean was, and it he could make an easy guess as to why they’d stopped speaking. “Guessin’ he didn’t make it around to coming around about this, did he?”
Dorian made a show of sighing dramatically, because it was easier to fake a reaction to hide his actual reaction. "I had been keeping my affairs with other men secret for years, throwing myself into my studies and rising through the ranks as an Enchanter as an excuse to put off getting married to the very lovely woman that my family had chosen for me," he said. "That was, of course, until I was caught in bed with Lord Abrexius's son while his father was away. — This sort of thing isn't necessarily frowned upon in Tevinter, one turns a blind eye provided it's kept quiet and doesn't interfere, but it was humiliating for my father. 'So this is why Lord Pavus's boy is stalling on marriage!', you know. Vicious mockery all round."
“So you left?” Dean had a feeling the ending wasn’t that happy, but he sounded hopeful even as he fidgeted in his chair. The context was different from anything he would recognize, but the basics were the same and he could already feel his stomach turning.
"Ah … no, not immediately," said Dorian. He was flippant, but he wasn't willing to meet Dean's eyes. It felt wrong to speak ill of his father now that his father was dead, but these were the facts of the matter. "I was, in fact, abducted from the Abrexius estate — seven guards were killed in my kidnapping — and brought back home. I hadn't been there for some time, and apparently tales of my drunken debauchery in Minrathous had become too much for my family to bear. So, of course, it was only natural to retrieve me and bring me back home to Qarinus, where it was decided that it was best for everyone if I never left my wing of the estate."
Dean looked away when Dorian did, staring at the corner of the desk so that if Dorian did look up, he wouldn’t find himself being watched. “That kind of shit happens where I’m from, too. Some parents will lock their kid up if they find out they were with the wrong person. Some of them get proactive and ship their kids off to these religious camps to pray the gay out of them. It’s usually more like torture. I’ve had to deal with one or two ghost cases of teenagers who didn’t make it out the other side of those places.”
Dorian frowned. "I'm aware," he said, his tone sharp. "My temporary banishment to Storybrooke came full with a set of memories, including a year and a half spent in the 'Dominican Republic' against my will to correct my deviant behavior."
He was angry about it, angry about everything that had been done to him in this imaginary place, and that anger simmered underneath everything he said.
"I was simply kept under house arrest, with locks and enchantments."
Dean nodded, with no good way to say I was too wrapped up in my own drama there to memorize yours. “But you got out eventually.”
"I had no choice," said Dorian, fiddling with a leather cuff around his wrist. He unbuckled it, tightened it, loosened it, then buckled it again. "My father had decided that the only way to save himself from scandal was for me to play by the rules, and the only way for me to play by the rules was for me to be … altered. Changed, fundamentally. He thought blood magic was suddenly a good route, after a lifetime of teaching me that it's abhorrent, the last resort of weak mages."
There was something to be said about situational awareness, a kind of sixth sense that alerted a person to danger, like the tension and dread of a horror film when the music had stopped and there was nothing but an eerie clunk that could be (but probably wasn’t) nothing. There was a chill down the back of Dean’s spine in some primal fear that he just didn’t get anymore when he was facing something that wanted to kill him.
“Clearly,” he said carefully, “it didn’t work.”
"No." Dorian had been quite forthcoming about everything up until that point, but when it came to this he glossed over any other details.
"So, I ran. I drifted across Tevinter with whatever money I had, staying with relatives until that ran out. It — other circumstances brought me south to Ferelden, and my father and I had but one brief conversation where I told him not-so-politely where to shove his excuses. And now he's dead."
He cleared his throat, running his hands over his knee. "He left me everything."
Dean looked over the desk, anywhere but at Dorian’s face, and settled on staring at the orb instead, taking note of the grooved pattern that took up its surface. “Maybe he felt guilty,” he said gently. “Or… you were still his son. No matter what happened.”
"Perhaps," said Dorian. "I wonder, at times, what would have happened had I agreed to speak with him."
“Does it matter? You said what you said, or didn’t say. You can’t think about that. It’s…” Dean let out the rest of breath, waffling before he decided to say, “My dad’s last words were fucked up. We fought right before he died. I hated myself for a long time for that, and it didn’t change a damn thing, it just made me miserable.”
Dorian glanced up at last, quiet when he asked: "What did he say?"
“Sounds worse without context.” But Dorian had told him something intensely personal, Dorian had let him in, so Dean wasn’t exposing himself to a wall. He sighed and said, “My brother had some issues. He was… infected with something by a demon as a kid that gave him some jacked up powers as an adult. Never made him less than human or less than good, kid’s still more of a hero than anyone I’ve ever met. Dad was hurt, and he told me I might have to take Sammy out myself. And then he died. I was supposed to go that day, and he traded his soul for mine. So.” He still wouldn’t (or couldn’t) look up to make eye contact. Not yet.
Dorian listened. Sometimes he was so chatty and flippant that it seemed a surprise when he listened, but his attitude was largely armor. "Your brother, he's still here," he said, uncertain.
“‘Course he is. The hell am I supposed to do with my life if Sam goes and gets himself permanently dead?” Dean shrugged it off, trying to make it sound more like a given than it had proven to be.
"As opposed to temporarily dead?"
“Yep.” As if it was obvious.
Dorian raised an eyebrow. "Of course."
“The world I come from is weird. Half the time death’s more like an inconvenient vacation.” Beat. “Sometimes in a hellpit.”
"Oh." Dorian didn't seem to comprehend, but he nodded anyway. "But your father is permanently dead..?"
“Yeah, well, not everyone can be made of Teflon.” Dean finally looked back up, like the worst moment had passed. “Point is, he’s been dead about ten years now, and speculating on what I could’ve said only made it harder to deal with it.”
Dorian nodded, taking a quiet, steadying breath. "You had a difficult relationship with him?" he asked. Now, he was curious. He'd helped to save Dean's lover, but he didn't know anything about them at all. Dean seemed a little cagey, a little awkward, and Dorian almost felt he could guess why.
“At times.” For someone who had apparently ‘dealt with it’, Dean certainly didn’t sound like he had. It was too noncommittal to be true. “He was an old school, military, blue-collar kinda guy. He raised us like soldiers and he expected a lot. Wasn’t wrong to, either, with the kind of world we lived in. He hit the road to hunt the demon that killed our mom, but I think he would’ve found his way to it even if she’d lived. It was just how he was programmed. He was a good drill instructor, but I don’t know if I’d say he was… parental. Not a hundred percent of the time.”
"He was hard on you," Dorian provided. He'd seen people out for revenge, he'd seen people who'd had their lives destroyed by demons.
“For a good reason,” Dean insisted. “I’d be dead now if he hadn’t taught us like he did. I didn’t get a lot of time to be young, but we couldn’t afford it. That’s not his fault. He was…” He gave Dorian a once-over, stewing on something that he wasn’t sure he wanted to say out loud or not. They weren’t good friends, but they weren’t strangers, either. “He was what a man should’ve been, and he expected me to end up just like him. I guess for a while I was.”
Dorian squinted at him. "You don't believe you're as a man should be?" he asked gently.
Dean fidgeted, making a face and frowning. “That came out weird. There’s not a lot of room for people who are different where I come from, even before you bring hunting into it, and hunters have to be tough. Anyone who survives past their first year has to be made of steel, or we die, so a certain kind of person survives. Hate to say it, but men do better than women. Women do the job great, but it’s not about what they can do, it’s about how other people look at them.”
"You're concerned about how people look at you, then," said Dorian. He was trying to fill in the gaps between Dean's words, from what little he knew of Dean and what Dean had said, coupled with his own knowledge of living in Storybrooke, which was his closest approximation to Dean's culture. "And because you aren't … a certain type of person, you fear what that means for you."
“It matters. And it mattered to my dad. He died before I met Cas, but obviously we didn’t, uh…” Dean spread his hands. “We didn’t exactly sit around and talk about our feelings or what all this shit meant. He just knew what the world was like, acted accordingly, expected me to do the same. And when I didn’t, things got a little rough. Not kidnap me and do spells on me rough, but...” He trailed off for a moment, worrying the inside of his cheek between his teeth before he continued. “Sam left for college when he was eighteen, so for a long time, my dad was the only person in the world. Before that it was just the three of us. You can’t just walk off a fight with someone like that.”
Dorian laced his fingers over his knee. "My father was a good man," he said. "My father taught me to hate blood magic in a place where such a thing is common and people are ruthless. He raised me well. I frustrated him, because I was arrogant and bossy and I made my teachers angry, but I never did doubt he loved me. But he wanted a legacy, he wanted to create the next Archon, and he expected much of me that I couldn't offer. I … for years, I thought there was something wrong with me, because he was disappointed. For years, I thought that if only I'd been better, he wouldn't have felt so desperate that he turned to blood magic."
“You can love someone and still be a dick to them,” Dean said definitively. “That’s usually part of the problem.”
"He was blinded by ambition," said Dorian. "At some point, I was less his son and more the symbol. My family is … we're important, in Tevinter. We're an old and prominent family, and perhaps I've let everyone down. I don't know. Perhaps that's why I returned home, to do my part to reform Tevinter after my father's assassination. I could have stayed with the Inquisition, and with Bull, but … I do love my homeland. I do care."
He sighed, then waved a dismissive hand. "But you're absolutely right. Whether he loved me or not, he could have loved me for me instead of what I should have been."
Dean didn’t necessarily get most of what Dorian was talking about. The specifics were lost, but he followed it closely enough that he understood, and he nodded while he listened. “You know,” he said carefully, after a pause, “Just because Tevinter’s important to you doesn’t mean you should have to give up what makes you happy to fix it. I watched Cas beat himself bloody trying to save Heaven from himself, and it didn’t get him shit. No one ever says thank you, no one ever appreciates it, and he’d rather be with us anyway. They see all the best parts about him as his weaknesses. People are gonna do what they want to, whether you push that damn boulder up the hill for them or not.”
Dorian smiled sadly. "I wish I could justify it that way," he said. "It matters little now that I'm here, but there are very few voices of reason in Tevinter that have any kind of power. And I haven't given up on my lover. Not entirely. I simply go long stretches of time without seeing him in person, but speaking via sending crystal. It's a little peculiar to actually live with him, now."
Dean had to laugh, running a hand over his face. “Christ, I know what that’s like. Before now I saw Cas a couple days at a time at most. Living together is, uh…”
"Awkward?" Dorian supplied. "Irritating? The sex is blissful but suddenly you're confronted with all his terrible habits?"
“The first week we got together, he woke me up at three in the morning to ask me what I thought goats were thinking about. Just in general.”
Dorian made a face. "They're goats, what could they possibly be thinking about?"
“Angels can apparently talk to animals. I share my room with a fat asshole rabbit named Princess Fluffles because Cas insists he named himself. I think he’s fucking with me,” Dean said flatly.
"Bull has a nug named Dawnstone that I swear is stealing my rings," said Dorian with an exasperated sigh. "I can't get over its little hands where its feet should be."
Dean shuddered. “That’s fucked up. Princess just watches me. Constantly. I guess that’d be less weird if Cas didn’t stare at people, too, but he does, so it feels like the walls have eyes.”
Dorian smiled crookedly. "I'm afraid I know little of your lover," he said. "We aren't exactly friends, and most of the time I've been here he's been possessed by a demon."
Dean made a face at the word lover. He’d never come around to owning any kind of title — boyfriend just sounded childish, they weren’t married, and Dean had resigned himself to vague grunting and the occasional gesture to get his point across when he was explaining it. “Angel. Though I guess it’s not a big different to you, your demons and our angels work on similar rules. Cas is… Cas. He’s a weird dude. Good, though, he’s a lot better to hang around when he’s not riding shotgun to the Devil.”
"And he was an angel himself, but no longer?"
“Right. He was human when he got here because someone stole his grace — like an angel soul, source of the their power, the whole shebang — and got it back in a pod drop.” Eh. Close enough to the truth to count. “Fighting with Lucifer destroyed most of it, and he used the rest keeping me alive, so now he’s human again. Probably for good.”
Dorian nodded in understanding. "I know a young man who was once a spirit," he said. "A demon, a spirit, whatever he was, he willed himself into a human appearance. He lived among us, he fought at the Inquisitor's side, and after a while he was clearly more human than he was a creature of the Fade … but he stares. And 'weird dude' is probably how you'd describe it, yes."
“Cas just doesn’t get personal space or… manners. He’s getting there.” Dean shrugged. He was used to it and found the weirder aspects endearing, even if he liked to complain about them. “He just takes everything too seriously. Everything’s new, so everything matters pretty much the same.”
"Cole likes to reach into one's mind. We believe he was a spirit of Compassion, yes? He senses what hurts people, and decides that he can sort of … dip into one's mind and take a drink, and then simply blurt out his findings when it pleases him. He's … I've got a certain fondness for him now, though I understand you," said Dorian.
He chuckled quietly. "One day I found a wooden duck in my bed. I asked him, 'Cole, was that you?' and he replied that no, he was not a wooden duck."
Dean snorted. “Sounds like somethig Cas would say. He’s picking up sarcasm, I can’t always tell when he’s screwing with me.” He shifted in his seat, gently touching his stomach like he needed to support himself when he moved. “So what about Bull? What about that guy screams ‘live with me’?”
"Absolutely nothing, logically," said Dorian flatly. "He's a massive brute of a man."
Dean raised his eyebrows. “That seems like a requirement, doesn’t it?”
Dorian laughed, looking down at his hands with a helpless little sigh. "Yes, it is." Bull made him weak in the knees, confounded his senses, and was so completely overwhelming sometimes that it was difficult to even achieve coherent thought.
Dean smiled, his mouth lopsided and his expression charmed. “Yeah, I bet it is. That’s gotta be love, you couldn’t pay me enough to handle eight feet of anyone unless I was really into them.”
Dorian bit his lip, smiling dreamily. "Yes, well, it's a great deal of effort but entirely worth it."
“How do you walk?”
Dorian lazily uncrossed and recrossed his legs, stretching his arm out so he could drum his fingertips against the edge of the desk. "He is very conscientious of my needs," he said, with a proud little tilt of his chin. "And I am rather experienced."
“Maybe I’m just rusty or slowing down, Cas got real… enthusiastic once he realized he liked sex, and graced up, he doesn’t sleep. Or multitask. He’s like that saying, an object in motion stays in motion? I needed a goddamn white flag.” Clearly, he was comfortable enough with Dorian by now. Maybe it was because he was sure that whatever Dorian was doing was ten times crazier or more difficult, and not feeling like the weirdest thing in the room helped.
"Kaffas." Dorian laughed. "I can't tell if that's a dream or something out of only my cruelest of nightmares," he said. "Not that Bull's much different, though he does sleep, and I do manage to thoroughly exhaust him."
“It sounds hot until you’re trying to catch your breath and you hear ‘Dean, I have another idea’.” Dean dropped his voice, imitating Cas’s overly serious, gravelly tone.
"Oh, good! When we're both found dead from exhaustion in our beds after a particularly long night, it will be for the same reason." Dorian seemed happy to talk about this — he rarely did, and tended to keep his feelings to himself. Emotions were difficult, but he felt relaxed enough to cackle about his overzealous sex life as long as Dean was in the same predicament.
Dean never talked about his sex life. Maybe it was the recent trouble he and Cas had been in wearing away at all the walls he’d put up, but it was a relief to talk about it. He’d always been cagey about his relationship with Cas before, even with the friends he’d made, but he could’t bring himself to care enough to get all that defensive anymore. Not when he’d almost lost Cas for good.
“He has zero concept of what’s weird and what isn’t,” Dean said with an incredulous laugh. “None. Doesn’t know what’s embarrassing. The real challenge is not laughing, ‘cause that’s just a dick thing to do.”
"It's not that Bull doesn't know what's weird," said Dorian, "it's that he doesn't care. And neither do I, for that matter."
“There was a Christmas dickbow.” And there was really no other way to say that.
Dorian raised his eyebrows. The only reason he knew what Christmas was was thanks to Storybrooke, which made the phrase easier to decipher.
"I'm not above a little ornamentation," he said idly, examining his nails again.
“It was just…” Dean trailed off and gestured vaguely. “Unexpected. So there was a naked angel in a bow and a Santa hat explaining why Christmas was actually the wrong time of year and the Bible got parts of the nativity story all wrong. The sex was good, but that part was weird.”
Dorian smirked. "I hope you took that bow off with your teeth."
Dean spread his hands, as if to say isn’t it obvious? “Of course I did, it was the only way to get him to shut up.”
"You're a good man," said Dorian, and it was only after he said it out loud that he realized he wasn't joking. "It … I haven't spoken of this with many people. Any of this." He gestured vaguely. "I'm glad that you managed to recover him and that he's safe."
At first, Dean reacted like he’d been caught doing something wrong, fidgeting like he’d just remembered to be embarrassed. But it was kneejerk, and once it settled that nothing was wrong, he said, “Neither have I. Not really. Maybe keeping it close to the chest just doesn’t feel as important as it used to.” After another moment of thought, he added thoughtfully, “I almost lost him when I would barely talk about being with him. How fucked up would that have been?”
That statement apparently hit home, and Dorian ran his fingertips along the edge of the desk. "Bull is the sort of man who, on the surface, is embarrassing to admit that you like, sort of like the disgusting little meat cubes on a stick they sell on street corners that are so delicious but you'd never want to say you're craving it. I … I'm Tevinter, he's Qunari, and I know that means nothing to you, but it certainly does to me. And for the longest time I never wanted to admit to anything, or … discuss feelings, or any other nonsense like that. I haven't been good about letting him be affectionate when there are others around, and I usually deflect his heartfelt sentiments with sarcasm and exasperation."
He smiled faintly. "I'm not a very good example of how to treat your lover when others are around."
Dean didn’t mention that street food sounded great after a year of being at Mount Weather. Seemed like missing the point.
“I’ve never been great at feelings? But, from what I know of dating women, a little PDA can go a long way.” He nodded sagely. You’re welcome for the advice, Dorian. “Cas isn’t really like that, he’s fine as long as he knows he can find me if he needs to, but… I dunno, I suck at this stuff, but you could probably get a little leverage with him next time you want something if you don’t deflect every once in a blue moon.”
"It's not worth it," Dorian said solemnly. "I … didn't have a good time in that alternate world. I chose my father's wishes over mine and I left him. I know it wasn't real, but the idea of losing him is unbearable to me. Which — I suppose that means I love him."
He made a face in spite of himself, clearly a defense mechanism, but there wasn't much bite behind it.
“It’s a bitch, right?”
Before Dorian had a chance to answer, the door opened. Asala ducked her head in, bowing down so she wouldn’t smash her horns against the frame. “Dorian? —Oh. Dean.”
“Hey—” Dean pushed himself up to stance, wincing a little and reflexively covering his stomach. “Sorry, I won’t stick around, but I came by to see you and… there you are.” He cleared his throat as she stepped into the room, remembering why he’d come here in the first place. “I wanted to come by and say thank you in person. I know I didn’t last time we talked.”
Asala brought her hands up in a gesture that said don’t mention it. “You’re more than welcome, I’m just happy everyone lived. Is everyone recovering well? How’s the…” She motioned toward her own abdomen. “Do you mind?”
“Yeah, no, not at all.” Dean tugged up his t-shirt, exposing the healing wound on his belly. Healing magic had taken care of enough to seal it and keep him from needing bandages, but it still looked ugly: there was a big mark the size of a man’s fist that had clearly been a bloody flesh wound earlier, the healing skin rough and scarred and all shades of bruised. “I’ve had worse.”
Dorian sat up and leaned forward, his fingertips going to his mouth. "Maker, I'd no idea. I could have at least dulled the pain for you, why didn't you mention it? That's dreadful."
Dean shrugged, waving Asala off when she motioned as if to help him. “Nah, I’m fine. Don’t waste your magic. It looks a hell of a lot better than it did.”
Dorian frowned. "Dare I ask?"
“You never did tell me how you got that,” Asala added, moving away so she could lean on Dorian’s desk.
“Lucifer. Obviously. He wasn’t happy with me, so…” Dean mimed what Lucifer had done to him, hand hovering over his skin, but it was clear what he meant. “He ruptured something. Kidney, maybe? I’m rusty on my anatomy.”
Dorian grimaced, unable to hide the little sound of disgust that bubbled up. "Fasta vass, that's… I've seen enough, thank you, you can put your shirt back down."
“What, you don’t find scars sexy?” Dean grinned while he pulled his shirt back down. “And here I was planning on showing you the werewolf bite on my ass.”
"Whatever scars you have, Bull has far more, so I do get my fill of them," said Dorian lightly. Dean's grin was disarming, and he had to smile in turn. "You should smile more often. Consider it."
“I’ll think about it.” Dean winked, just to be obnoxious, and then he turned away toward the door. “I’ll let you two get back to whatever. Nice talking to you, Dorian.”
Asala watched him go with a little wave to serve as a farewell, turning to Dorian once the door was shut. “Were you being nice while I was gone?”
Dorian watched Dean leave. He didn't answer Asala immediately, and he cleared his throat, shuffling the papers on his desk. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the conversation he'd just had. It was rare to find someone who understood him. He'd let his guard down with a relative stranger, and he felt like he was all the better for it.
It was a moment too late, but he looked up at Asala with a biting smile. "I'm always nice."