
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/130968.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      Multi
  Fandom:
      Dragon_Age:_Origins
  Relationship:
      Duncan/Female_Andras/Riordan
  Character:
      Duncan, Female_Andras, Riordan
  Additional Tags:
      Double_Penetration, double_anal, double_vaginal, BDSM, Kink_Meme,
      Prostitution
  Stats:
      Published: 2010-11-02 Words: 5618
****** The Wolf and the Cat ******
by Elysium-fic_(RCD_Anon)
Summary
     Written for a kink-meme prompt here:
     I know someone wants a scruffy Warden sandwich. It can't be just me.
     I don't care who the f!Warden is, or when it occurs in the timeline.
     I just want everyone to have a grand old time. Oral, anal, DP,
     bondage, roleplay, whatever. Bonus points if dwarven ale is involved
     and they wake up in just their smallclothes with tattoos on their
     foreheads, bound for Rivain.
Notes
See the end of the work for notes
"Duncan is dead, Marguerite," Riordan said softly, his grey eyes filled with
grief.
"Oui, I had assumed as much."
"They're all dead. Those imbeciles at the border said Ostagar was a slaughter
before they turned us away. All the Grey Wardens of Ferelden are dead, ma
bichette. Does that mean nothing to you?"
"And what should it mean to me?" Marguerite asked with a shrug. "I am grieved
for the loss of Duncan, it is true. As for the rest, I did not know them. To me
their deaths mean only that it is now more likely that others with whom I am
far more familiar shall die."
"Ah, you are a cold woman, Marguerite," Riordan sighed. "I shall never
understand you."
She reached under his leather war skirt and cupped him with a hand that was
rapidly warming far beyond body temperature. "Some parts of you do not find me
so cold, mon chat," she whispered with a satisfied smile.
"I must leave at nightfall," he said, groaning softly as he ground against the
heat of her hand. "Duncan's last letter said he had some promising recruits. An
unsworn templar, and possibly a young woman from Highever. I will sneak across
the border, try to reach our compound in Denerim and see if any the Grey
Wardens still live."
Marguerite nodded. "Then it is best we do not waste time, yes?" she suggested,
sinking to her knees before him.
Neither of them felt the need to point out that it would be the last time she
would ever see him.
===============================================================================
Marguerite had come to the Grey Wardens damaged. Damaged from years spent
terrorized by the fat, sweaty merchant who employed her mother as his kitchen
elf so that he would have access to her tiny, white-blond daughter, whose
shrieks of pain he was convinced stood as a testament to his manhood. Damaged
from the terror she'd known when the templars had dragged her to the Circle of
Magi when, at the age of eight, she accidentally killed the merchant with a
bolt of lightning to stop him from hurting her yet again. Damaged from the
bigotry of the human apprentices in the Tower, who did not seem to care that
they themselves were ridiculed and oppressed, so long as they could pass the
derision they received along to the elven mages they trained with. Damaged by
the cruelty of the templars who presented a pious faces before their Knight-
Commander but secretly disdained their vows and treated any apprentice unlucky
enough to be discovered alone as fair game. Damaged from years spent selling
herself on the docks to every filthy sailor with a copper coin or a crust of
bread after she found a way to destroy her phylactery and free herself from the
templars' yoke.
One day a Grey Warden with long, dark hair had come to the docks, filled with a
sorrow and rage she didn't care to question. She did not know why he had chosen
her, only that once she had taken him back to her dingy room in a waterfront
hovel, he became cruel, and something awoke within her, something she thought
had been killed long before she ever became a woman.
Passion.
He did not merely rut above her until he was spent, adding his seed to the
leavings of dozens of others crusted on the filthy linens upon her cot. He had
hurt her—which sometimes her patrons did, though few with such skill—with teeth
and fingernails and hard, bruising hands. He had also unrelentingly sought her
pleasure—which none of her patrons did—even when she told him that he would
have to pay extra if he wasted such time. She had reveled in it, feeling alive
for the first time since that day in childhood when her innocence had been
shattered by the fat merchant.
Somewhere in that moment, as his violence escalated, she began to feel
threatened. Forgetting that she had no great objection to dying, she had
unthinkingly defended herself with her long-unused magic. The Grey Warden had
known her immediately for what she was, but he did not turn her in to the
templars as she might have expected. Instead, he had taken her back with him to
the Grey Warden compound in Val Royeaux.
The Grey Wardens, she thought, would offer a chance for a more meaningful death
than if she died of a pox or at the hands of a drunken sailor bent on brutality
or by the templars if they ever caught up with her again. Marguerite had
welcomed that. And if others of the order were also possessed of the sharp-
edged desires Riordan had demonstrated that day on the docks when he recruited
her, so much the better.
But she was to be disappointed.
She did not die with her Joining, nor was death in battle against the darkspawn
immediately forthcoming. Instead, she learned, it was to be thirty years doing
little of actual importance before she sought the Deep Roads and the end of her
own life. And Riordan did not seek her company again; whatever demon he had
been exorcising that day at the docks, it seemed to trouble him no more. There
were rumors—not that she often troubled herself to listen to the idle gossip of
the other Wardens—about a woman he had loved and the babe she had borne him,
whom he had driven away so that she would not have to watch him succumb to the
taint. Whatever his reasons for his behavior that day, after her Joining he
barely deigned to acknowledge Marguerite's presence, much less visit her bed.
She did not fit in among the other Grey Wardens any more than she had the other
mages. Few of them, even the humans, seemed to share the common disdain for
mages and elves, and yet she was odd to them. Too cold, too impersonal, too
pragmatic. She was not interested in forming friendships or being part of a
fraternity; she merely wanted a death that would be more purposeful than her
life had been. What few Grey Wardens managed to overcome their uneasiness about
her personality enough to bed her quickly found themselves in over their heads
when they discovered her keen taste for cruelty, and so she had not been in the
order long before she found herself sleeping alone, except on the rare
occasions she sought out a whore to meet her needs, however clumsily.
She had been a Grey Warden for nearly six years when the archdemon awoke,
discovered by the darkspawn as they tunneled through the earth seeking for it,
century after century. They all felt it happen, every single Grey Warden in
Thedas. Whether asleep or awake, they all felt that sudden roar and the song
within their minds.
A Blight was coming.
Only Marguerite met this news with anything other than dread.
It would be another three years until the darkspawn horde would emerge from
underground and reveal its location. In those years, the Grey Wardens sent many
expeditions into the Deep Roads to try to garner some idea of where the Blight
would first appear, but to little avail. The archdemon fed, grew stronger,
gathered the darkspawn to it and sent bands into the world to corrupt and
retrieve humans, elves, dwarves and qunari. They brought back females and soon
their numbers swelled as the broodmothers began to produce more of their kind.
In those years, the Grey Wardens suddenly came to life. Message traffic bustled
in and out of the Val Royeaux compound, to Ferelden, Antiva, the Anderfels.
Recruitment efforts redoubled in all parts of Thedas. The Warden-Commander for
each nation was summoned to a conference, and since the Grey Warden "sense" of
the archdemon placed it somewhere in southern Thedas, they convened not at
Weisshaupt, but in Val Royeaux,
It was there she met Duncan.
He and Riordan greeted each other like long-lost brothers, smiling and
embracing, clapping each other on the back. Seeing them together, it was
perhaps the first time Marguerite felt regret that she had never really formed
any friendships with her fellow Grey Wardens.
She wondered about this Duncan. What sort of man was it who could get such an
animated reaction from the mild-mannered Riordan with his hidden streak of
fine-edged cruelty. Duncan, she thought, looked like he had edges as well, for
all that he was unfailingly proper and polite. His edges would not be those of
the finely-honed dagger, but of the claymore.
Not a cat like Riordan, all subtlety and hidden claws, but a wolf, bold with
savage, tearing fangs.
The thought made desire stir within her where there normally existed only
emptiness. And that desire was heightened by the fact that while Riordan
studiously pretended she didn't exist, Duncan was attentive and charming, his
dark eyes warming when he saw her. A hint of a promising smile made his lips
twitch beneath his beard when he realized she was a mage.
She resolved then that she would have him before he returned to Ferelden.
Thus did she find herself descending to the great hall that served as the
dining and common room of the keep one evening. Many of the other Wardens grew
quiet when she entered, for usually she retired after supper and had never made
an attempt to join them as they drank their wine and played cards or dice or
other games of chance. Still, Duncan rose and greeted her with a smile when she
entered, and bade her sit with him and Riordan. She gladly accepted.
"Duncan managed to bring us a cask of dwarven ale when he stopped at Orzammar
on his way to Orlais," Riordan remarked as she deliberately insinuated herself
into the too-small space on the bench between them. At the trestle tables
around them, conversations resumed and her presence was accepted and forgotten.
"Dwarven ale?" She looked in askance at Duncan. "I have not tried it."
The Fereldan Warden offered her his tankard and chuckled when she wrinkled her
nose at the smell.
"This is something we're meant to drink, yes?" she asked skeptically.
"Only if you want to get drunk," he answered.
"It smells like old laundry water."
"I assure you, it tastes no better," Riordan said dryly, his voice muffled by
his own tankard. "But it does the job."
"Ah well," she sighed, lifting the tankard. "It can hardly be worse than some
of the men I have had in my mouth."
Duncan and Riordan both laughed when she promptly spat out the mouthful of ale.
"Sacred bride of the Maker!" she swore, gasping and coughing. "This is a joke,
yes? A prank upon me?"
"Forgive me, Marguerite," Duncan said gallantly, taking the tankard from her.
"I would never play so cruel a trick. It's an acquired taste. Here, let me get
you some wine to cleanse your palate."
Shuddering with revulsion, she took a long draught of the wine he poured into a
goblet from a flagon on the trestle table before him. "Leave it to the dwarves
to concoct such an odious brew," she finally said. "Surely they do it just to
be disagreeable, no?"
"That seems as good an explanation as any." Duncan lips twitched again.
"Marguerite... I am curious. How did you come by your name?"
"Ah, you mean how did I come by a human name?"
"I mean no offense. In Ferelden I don't often encounter elves with human names,
but I've met several from Orlais."
"I am not offended," the mage shrugged. "My mother, she was a foolish woman,
yes, like many Orlesian elves who start to think themselves part of part of
their employer's family. She thought if she gave her child a human name,
the—ah, what is the word the Dalish use?—the shemlen might not see that I was
an elf."
"It's a lovely name, even if it is nearly as long as the woman who bears it,"
Duncan said, and Marguerite smiled at the compliment. Few of the men she'd
serviced when working the docks had ever bothered with flattery.
Riordan snorted, irritated with their flirting.
The evening aged, the wine and ale flowed. Tongues loosened and hands became
freer. Wardens began trickling out of the hall alone or in pairs and eventually
only the three of them remained. She liked this Duncan, with his coarse
Fereldan accent and his dark Rivaini complexion. He did not treat her as an
oddity or a whore, did not seem to notice nor care that she was prickly and
unlikeable. It was very simple; he wished to have her and then he would leave,
back to his filthy, backwards country whose sailors had always reeked and
seemed so very ignorant when she had bedded them.
She had no objections to that plan, and he had no objections when her hand
stroked him through his breeches under the table.
"Tell me, mon loup, are you a sweet, gentle cub, or do you bite?" she murmured,
leaning close and closing her teeth upon his earlobe.
"I can go either way, if the occasion calls for it," he answered, setting his
tankard aside and turning his head so that his face was all but touching hers.
The dwarven ale didn't smell nearly so objectionable on his breath as she
licked the outline of his lips. "Which would you prefer?"
"I wish to feel your teeth," she sighed. "Mon chat, Riordan, once he had claws,
but now I think he has lost them."
"And why would you think that?" Riordan asked coldly, setting his empty tankard
down upon the table.
"It has been, what, nearly nine years since you found me on the docks, and
still you disdain me," she said, flipping from desire to annoyance in a
heartbeat. "At first I think that of all men, you are special, yes? That you
understand that it is only pain which makes the living worthwhile until death
comes to release you. You, of all the Grey Wardens in Val Royeaux, know how to
bring me pleasure, but do you come to me in all this time? Non! And so I think
that man I met on the docks, that fierce Warden whose hands wielded such
beautiful pain, he is gone. Pah! Replaced by an impotent fool who knows nothing
of passion."
She thought she might have flown at him in a rage, and that too, was thrilling.
To feel anger for the first time in—had she ever felt it, she wondered? It was
a glorious, vital feeling, her heart pounding in her breast, her blood singing
through her veins and roaring in her ears.
"Marguerite, go easy upon him," she heard Duncan say soothingly, as he pushed
the bench back from the tab to make enough room to draw her onto his lap as
though she were no more than a child. "You do not know Riordan so well as you
think."
"No, Duncan," Riordan said quickly. "My sorrows are not for her to know."
"You think I care about your sorrows?" Marguerite sneered. "You know nothing of
sorrows! They are useless! They make us feel dead while we still draw breath.
It is pain and rage and passion which make us feel alive, but if you will not
give me this then I have no time to waste for you."
Swift as the cat she had compared him to, he had her by the throat, dragging
her off Duncan's lap and pinning her against the table. Empty tankards
clattered to the floor and her half-filled chalice of wine spilled, spreading
about her like a pool of blood before dripping down between the slats of the
table. Marguerite glared up at him, her chest heaving for a breath that she
could not draw. She did not try to summon her magic, for she knew he would not
kill her. He would never waste such a valuable resource. Still, the spots began
to grow in her eyes, and it was not until she was on the brink of
unconsciousness that he released her.
She lay upon the table, gasping and wheezing desperately for air through her
bruised throat as Duncan held Riordan's arm and spoke to him softly.
"She does not know about Ziela, my friend," he said, attempting to placate the
enraged Riordan. "She would not speak so otherwise. It is the call of the
archdemon. We are all on edge, all aware of our impending deaths. I feel it,
too."
"If she wants rage, I will show her rage."
"Yes, do!" Marguerite croaked. "Bah, men! You are all so predictable! This...
Ziela, was she small and fair, an elf like me? Did she simper and coo and vow
her love until you shattered her heart? And hating yourself, did you seek me
out and punish me for your own sins, and then try to atone by bringing me here
and making me a Grey Warden? I was right, you are a fool!"
He was upon her before she had finished hurling her insults, his tongue
thrusting into her mouth while he hands grabbed great fistfuls of her hair and
pulled painfully. This was better, this was what she wanted. He pulled her head
back until she thought her neck might break and began biting along the line of
her throat painfully.
"Oh, oui, mon chat," she moaned when his teeth closed over the tendon between
her neck and shoulder and began to cut into her skin.
Riordan pulled away enough to open the toggles closing her robe and then he
split the shift she wore beneath open with almost casual ease. But there was
nothing easy about his teeth as they found her breasts and began creating
throbbing red rings of pain in her soft, white flesh, some of which seeped
blood.
She lay upon that trestle table like a roast of hind upon a platter, and
Riordan was the ill-manned brute set to tear her apart with his hands rather
than the carving knife. She could feel her sex clenching, flooding with
arousal. It had been so long since she had taken a lover she knew she would be
exquisitely tight and that, too, she relished. He would hurt when he took her,
and she was eager for it.
Another pair of hands joined Riordan's upon her body, lower. Duncan peeled away
her smallclothes, exposing her dripping wet sex to the cool air of the common
hall. Only then did it dawn upon her that anyone in the compound could stumble
upon them and see her being gloriously brutalized upon that table.
She smiled and urged them on in vulgar language.
When Duncan's teeth clamped on her inner thigh, Marguerite bucked and screamed,
one of her hands scrambling for his hair in its queue, seeking to pull him
closer and grind her hairless sex against the roughness of his beard. Riordan's
teeth found her nipple and bit down just as Duncan thrust three fingers roughly
into her sex and she came with a scream that echoed in the rafters.
"Be silent!" Riordan growled. "Do you want to bring the whole compound down
upon us?"
"If you wish my silence, mon chat," she taunted, "then perhaps you'd best find
some better occupation for my mouth, no?"
And so it was that she found herself dragged to the edge of the table, where
her head hung upside-down into space while the rest of her body lay open and at
the mercy of Duncan's hands and mouth. Riordan quickly divested himself of his
doublet and breeches—here, safe among other Grey Wardens in the compound, they
did not wear armor—and placing one hand under her head to support her, thrust
into her mouth.
At this angle, it was easy for him to pass into her throat; there was nothing
she could do to prevent it, in fact, for all that she gagged and scratched and
pushed at him. His other hand seized her breasts and squeezed roughly, bruising
her soft white flesh. Meanwhile, Duncan's hands and teeth continued to score
her thighs. Each time she writhed and tried to move away, he dragged her back,
biting harder, shoving his fingers into her sex more ruthlessly. The only thing
that kept her from coming again was Riordan's cock in her mouth, choking her,
thrusting into her bruised throat as the pleasure Duncan's fingers wrought
mounted ever higher within her.
She could feel Riordan's body quaking, inching ever closer to his release as he
fucked her throat. Her hands found the forearm of the hand he had grasping her
breast and though she could not speak enough to chant a spell, she managed to
send enough power into his body to force him over the edge with a sharp shock,
despite his efforts to hold back. He cursed her as thick, salty fluid surged
over her tongue and down her throat. An instant later, Duncan's tongue parted
her folds and found her pearl and had it not been for Riordan's cock still in
her mouth, her shriek would have awoken the entire keep.
Somehow, Riordan ended up on the table behind her, forcing her to sit up and
watch Duncan as he devoured her, his fingers pushing into both her openings
while his mouth nibbled and sucked and licked until Marguerite flailed and
bucked, restrained only by Riordan's iron-threwed arms about her ribs. When she
looked down at her body, she was astonished by the array of bite marks and
bruises that had quickly blossomed on her pale skin. Each individual ache and
pain made her feel spectacularly alive. And Riordan was making certain it was
not merely the front of her that was marked. He bit her shoulders and neck,
adding that delicious edge of suffering to the pleasure Duncan brought. His
fingers mercilessly pinched and pulled at her nipples, and his voice in her ear
promised greater agony to come.
At his command, she summoned the cool energy of rejuvenation to her hand and as
it washed over him, his cock swelled against her back, hard and eager. Duncan
pulled away, his beard beaded with saliva and other fluids he had pulled from
her, and he sat upon the edge of the table and pulled her into his lap, kissing
her deeply. He reeked of her musk, tasted of her so strongly she groaned and
eagerly licked at his chin for more. She didn't know how or when his breeches
had been opened—perhaps he'd been stroking himself as he plied her with his
mouth—but it didn't matter. She straddled his lap and forced herself down upon
him, thrilled at the ache of stretching around him.
Duncan's need was scarcely less urgent than Riordan's. Perhaps there had been
more truth than she realized to his words about anxiety over the archdemon
driving them. When Marguerite begged him for more, he gladly gave it, lying
back upon the table for an angle that allowed him to drive deeper into her as
he lifted and lowered her upon his cock, adding the bruising force of his hands
upon her waist to her own thrusts.
It hurt to take him so deeply, hurt to feel him ram against the gate to her
womb. It was marvelous. When she began to wail, Riordan stuffed her own damp
smallclothes into her mouth and clamped his hand over them so that she could
not spit them out.
She heard the scrape of the bench against the stone floor as Riordan
impatiently kicked it out of his way. He pushed her down onto Duncan's chest
and leaned over her, pinning her between them.
"Shall we split her in two if we both occupy her, do you think?" he asked, as
though the answer mattered.
Marguerite hummed her agreement with the plan, wriggling enthusiastically
against Duncan, eager to feel Riordan's cock wedging itself into her derrière.
Instead, however, he began to force his way into her sheath alongside Duncan.
Had she been less wet, less ready, less willing to accommodate suffering, she
might have indeed thought she was being split in two. Taking Duncan, human and
generously appointed as he was, had been a challenge. To stretch around them
both had her moaning into her makeshift gag, lying limp and trembling and
sweating upon Duncan's chest. They would break her, she thought deliriously
even as the burning began to fade somewhat as she adjusted and more moisture
flooded from her sheath to ease their passage. Surely they would break her, if
they began to move like this.
The thought filled her with mad joy and if her mouth had not been gagged, she
would have begun laughing hysterically.
But move they did, awkwardly at first as they rubbed against one another as
well as the walls of her sheath, and then finding a rhythm that allowed both to
slide in an out. Their thrusts were shallow, as neither one had an optimum
angle for deep penetration, but filled as she was it didn't matter. All that
mattered was the pleasure, the stretching, the pain of Riordan's teeth upon her
back and Duncan's hands, growing ever crueler at her breasts. In that
commingling of ecstasy and suffering lay the spark that made living worth it.
When Duncan's hand sought her pearl, she came, the spasms nearly lost in the
intensity of being so full, so sore. Almost immediately afterward Riordan sat
upon his hand and rudely worked a finger into her rear passage, and then
another in quick succession. Another uncomfortable intrusion to adapt to, made
even tighter by virtue of the fact that she was already filled nigh to
bursting, and yet he was merciless, working his fingers in and out.
Riordan spat again as he withdrew from her sheath and began to work his way
into the opening he had loosened. That was fullness and pain of a different
sort, for his preparations had been intended for his own ease and not to spare
her suffering. It burned at first, a pain she had not felt in far too long. But
pain soon became a pale and insufficient word to describe the feeling of them
both moving powerfully within her. Riordan would press her forward to deepen
his own strokes at times, and then Duncan would shove her upright to thrust
more fully at others, and so she was passed back and forth between one hard
chest and the other.
Lost in sensation, overwhelmed, overcome, she struggled against them even as
she yearned for more. They were all sweating, all trembling, all filled with
savage, desperate need. Duncan and Riordan, seeking to feel alive because they
knew death was so very near, and Marguerite seeking to taste the edge of death
because it was better than the nothingness of living. They punished each other
for the fates none of them could control.
Marguerite's fingernails scored Duncan's chest until he grabbed her hands and
would not release them. She thrashed and struggled until Riordan wrapped his
arms about her, pinning her arms to her sides and forcing her down onto Duncan
until she was trapped between them, overwhelmed by their size. Tears she did
not know she had shed mingled with the perspiration on Duncan's chest as his
skillful fingers once more brought her to the pinnacle.
"She trembles like a doe scenting the hunter," Riordan remarked as she quaked
between them, pulling the gag from her mouth. "Is this enough for you, ma
bichette, or do you still seek more?"
"Oui," she sobbed into Duncan's chest. "More."
"Marguerite, we do not wish to injure you," Duncan said, coming back to himself
somewhat and stroking her hair back from her face as she stared at him with
wild, desperate eyes.
"I am a mage. I will heal," she gasped as Riordan slammed hard into her
backside. "Please, I beg you, more."
It was Duncan who told Riordan to withdraw, he who turned her around above him
and insisted she call grease to her hand to slick his member before he took
possession of her rear passage, he who pulled her down with implacable
insistence upon him and filled her more than even Riordan had done.
"Caress Riordan," Duncan rasped from behind and beneath her. "Prepare him."
Marguerite's eyes widened as she began to understand what it was Duncan
intended. Surely not! Surely they would destroy her if they both....
...and yet her hand went out to Riordan anyway, coating his shaft with warm
grease as he thrust eagerly into the ring of her fingers and palm. Duncan
lifted her up and down easily, sliding her along his member until her rear
passage accepted him with no difficulty. Riordan seized her by two handfuls of
hair and kissed her hard, biting at her lips before laving the ache away with
his tongue. And then she was being drawn down to lie back upon Duncan's chest
and Riordan once again lay over her, this time intimately above her. He began
to push inside, not in front but in the rear where Duncan also possessed her.
He clapped a hand over her mouth when she would have screamed, for this was
something not even the brutes on the docks had ever done to her. She thought
there couldn't possibly be any way he could fit within that passage, but
eventually it began to yield to him as Duncan lay very still beneath and within
her. She was burning, certain that at any moment she would be torn asunder, and
still her body made room for him, one torturous second after another. When the
angle proved difficult to manage, he pushed one of her knees up and continued
onward.
Somehow, he filled her. She did not know how, could not imagine there was a way
to accomplish it. Her body protested the abuse even as her soul welcomed it.
She sobbed against Riordan's palm, lost to everything except sensation. There
was pain, yes, but also immense pleasure; the pleasure of being filled,
stretched, possessed.
Duncan was unable to move more than a minute bit at this angle without losing
his place within her, and so it was Riordan who guided them, Riordan who thrust
to fill her over and over, Riordan whose cock brought on Duncan's pleasure by
rubbing against him in the tightness of her body. Duncan's hands closed upon
her as he shuddered and groaned, and soon thereafter Riordan's motions grew
even easier, as Duncan shrank and softened. He plowed into her without mercy,
taking out upon her his own grief and rage and despair, and she took it all
into her, embraced it and felt it mate with her own tumultuous emotions.
His fingers brought her to the pinnacle again before he plunged over himself,
adding his seed to Duncan's as it coated her passage and seeped out of her and
onto the hair covering Duncan's groin. And then she was trapped between them
once more, caught between Duncan's sturdy and stable presence beneath her and
Riordan's unsteady trembling above her.
To her surprise, when he withdrew, Riordan kissed her softly, sweetly, and
thanked her. He murmured apologies and endearments and she found her arms going
around him and holding him tightly as Duncan's hands stoked her bruised and
teeth-marked shoulders.
She found herself too sore and weak to take the stairs alone, without even
sufficient energy or clarity of thought to summon a healing or rejuvenation
spell. Of them, Duncan was the least affected and it was he who bore her
upstairs, taking her not to her own chamber but to Riordan's. She hadn't the
energy to protest. Instead, she lay between them and fell quickly asleep.
Marguerite awoke when she felt Duncan stir the next morning, aching wonderfully
in every muscle in her body. He was hard against her hip and without thinking
she turned to him and welcomed his weight as he shifted above her. After such
abuse the night before he did not need to be rough to cause her pain, and she
welcomed it, smiling as rapture took him. When he collapsed above her, she
turned her head to see Riordan was awake and watching them.
Duncan was to depart that morning, however, and so she kissed him before he
rose from the bed to dress and bade him farewell, before turning her attention
to Riordan.
Duncan never returned to them again.
===============================================================================
She and Riordan never became lovers in the usual sense. Ever so often they
passed a night or two together, when it became too much to dwell in the vague
and uncertain space between life and death that seemed exclusively reserved for
Grey Wardens. Those nights became more frequent as the archdemon's screams
shattered their sleep, slowly driving them desperately mad. They tore at each
other violently only for Marguerite to heal their wounds in the morning, and
then they resumed their long watch for the reckoning they knew awaited them.
After the Fereldans refused them entry, they said their farewells to one
another in the way they knew best there in snowy passes of the Frostback
Mountains between Ferelden and Orlais, with teeth and nails, bruises and bites.
And then Riodan slipped into Ferelden alone and Marguerite returned to a life
in Val Royeaux that was now somehow even more vacant.
It was over a year later that she was sent instructions from Weisshaupt to
report to the new Grey Warden stronghold in Amaranthine and take over as its
commander.
Knowing how Ferelden had claimed the lives of the only two people in all of
Thedas she valued, she went eagerly.
End Notes
     Dragon Age: Origins and associated content belong to EA and Bioware.
     I am making no money from their use.
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