My Warden (COMPLETED)

Bliss

9:44 Skyhold

Mountain air brushed across his cheek and an eye rolled open. Cullen stared through a half empty bottle perched beside his sleepy face to a bookshelf bowing in the middle from a stack he kept meaning to move before it collapsed. No. That isn't right. He snapped up in his chair, the padding worn to fit his backside after two years of service. A line of drool coated missives laid out across his desk, all of them baring the Inquisitor's signature. Skyhold. How was he back in Skyhold?

Pain throbbed at the back of his skull, drumming through the vertebra and across his jaw. It felt as if he smashed the back of his head against the edge of a hewn brick. Gently, he reached back to touch it, causing even more pain to sear behind his eyes. This was a trick, some, some illusion of... Papers were piled along the desk, in the same five stacks he always had. Even the damn mug was the same, with the broken handle he patched up rather than replace. What was going on?

The door in front of him blew open. Used to people coming and going to pass through, Cullen didn't bother to look up until a voice chilled his heart.

"Don't tell me, you fell asleep at your desk again." He whipped his head so fast to follow the voice, pain shrieked up his neck. Lana. She stood there -- in his doorway -- alive, with an admonishing sigh upon her lips. "You know you have a perfectly good bed up that ladder. And..." she pointed at his hand gripping to the back of his neck, "it won't strain your shoulders." Chuckling, she closed the door and slid over the edge of his desk. Her fingers glanced across his, and they were warm, soft, with the same calluses he remembered. Cullen's hand froze as she gently picked it away and began to massage his neck.

"How...?" Cullen gulped, fighting down an urge to scurry away from her touch. It felt so real, so familiar, but that was impossible. Wasn't it? She shouldn't be here because, because of a reason slipping away from him. "Why are you here?"

Lana paused in digging into his shoulders, her thumb bouncing against his skin as she spoke, "Where else should I be - the mage quarters? That lasted all of two weeks after I officially joined your Inquisition. As I remember, a certain commander convinced me it was best to free up the bed for someone else and that we..." she leaned closer, luscious lips pressing against his earlobe as her hot breath washed over him, "move in together."

He screwed his eyes up tight as every inch of him awoke from an unending torment he'd barely been aware of -- his heart freed from its two year coma. It wasn't until she ran her slender fingers across his skin, Cullen realized how his soul desiccated on the vine. How badly he needed to feel her touch, hear her voice, smell her scent to revive him back to life. "Lana..." he groaned her name. "That doesn't sound," thoughts danced across his brain, dark ones screaming that it wasn't right, this wasn't right. But, out of everything in his life, every dark, desolate night and rigorous, exhausting day, she was the only thing that was ever right.

"What is it?" she asked.

"You..." Words wafted through his soul, struggling to be heard. Another throb blared at the back of his head, and Cullen reared in pain. He reached up to pinch his eyes only to find them drenched in tears. "You're dead," it rushed back at him, punching through this dream fog he wished he could envelop himself in.

She reached over to grab both of his hands inside her own. They should have been cold, still as the grave, but her warmth overtook his own crying out to comfort him. "Cullen, oh, sweetheart! Here..." placing one of his hands against her cheek, she leaned into it like a pillow, "feel me. I'm here. I'm real. It was a dream, one of the bad ones."

"You died in the fade," he shook his head, clinging to the razor wire of truth running through his mind. He hated how it sliced him apart, but he knew if he let go he'd be lost forever, "stayed behind so the others could..."