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Fear coursing hot and cold, waves in the blood that he had never learned to master, only to stay abreast of to prevent drowning.
Bethany Hawke held her ground, her calm, and that had made it all the easier for Cullen to follow suit. In any other circumstance, a room full of young mages with one on the panicky cusp of possession was a powder keg at best.
At worst, it was an abattoir.
Bethany Hawke, for all that she had had no formal training before her Harrowing, seemed more than adept at dealing with the kind of tragedy magic could cause. She had been grounding, where the sight of his Templar armour, necessary as his presence was, might have made it all worse.
And now—
—relief. Warm and warming and clung to with desperate fingers, the way her warm and warming fingers hooked into the top of his breastplate.
She was strong. He'd learned quickly enough that for all her gentle face and soft voice, she was still her brother's sister, a Hawke through and through. Strong and stubborn and with no intention of taking any of the world lying down. He'd never forget the quiet, cold dignity with which she marched beside him to the Gallows, a silence that seemed to pull at his attention, shooting curious glances in her direction under the pretext of making sure she wouldn't escape.
And so he knew she didn't cling to him in weakness or fear. Any fear she possessed was only the fuel to her fierce determination, that light inside her that shone like a bonfire on a snowbound night. Guiding. Warming. Lighting the way.
Cullen took a breath, trying to ground himself in reality. Trying to say something that would put them back onto their parallel yet separate paths, separated by the most fractional air, yet never as entangled as this. And promptly lost it all as, hard and fierce and victorious, her lips found his.
There and gone, like summer lightning, leaving the air too close, too warm.
The moment lingered on his lips, tasting of something sweeter than lyrium. Just for a fraction of time, there had been no need of a spirit healer to call on Compassion, here in the broken body of the Gallows.
'Compassion'. She pronounced it like a prayer, her breath tying it about his throat like a lover's favour. That she would attribute such a thing to him, who had no such softness left within him…
Maker, he was a fool. He had been a fool at sixteen, over quick smiles and stolen glances in mage attire. And now, caught in her gaze, in the wave of that fierce relief, he was exactly the same fool again. Of all that a Templar could fall prey too, here was the greatest vanity of all. That there could be anything between them, whole and untainted by fear and rank, was a fool's fantasy, the kind of thinking that made a Templar dangerous to their charges, who has so little recourse to reject such suggestion.
He would not be that danger.
Another breath, the lightning still burning his lips so gently, and they parted. Bodies. Ways. Futures.
It had to be so. He knew it well, and so did she.