LYING AWAKE, ACHING LOLOLOL
because Beffy said that it’s Fapping Friday……..
What did a healer have in the end? Not spirits, not demons—just a pair of hands. And they never healed themselves with their own fingers, undoing trouser laces and coat buckles and using bandages to patch a sleeve rather than to mend the flesh.
No; all a healer did was spend himself. And imagining the calluses on another man’s palms as they slid between his legs were temporary, a potion to quell the ache, not enough to unbreak bone.
Hawke’s thumb had a scar at the tip, greased with miasmic oils and stained by leather and tannin. His thumbnail was blunt and cracked and only the other day Anders had held it between both hands, mending the bloody knuckles and the swollen, split skin.
‘Tingles,’ Hawke said. He flexed his fingers and then fisted them, and Anders watched with no breath in his throat, raw as the unshaved stubble below Hawke’s chin and over his pulse. ‘But who heals the healer, am I right? Be careful with your magic hands.’
He left all laced up, stained jerkin and all, turning to wave with sweat on his chest.
Anders had stained his hands with plenty in his time: elfroot, which could be seen, and other, darker deeds, barely shadows on the veins. The darkspawn blood that throbbed beside his own, for example, and the flicker of lyrium in the rhythm of his heart. Electricity, which he’d never turned on himself. The shaking of his touch, the shattering heartbeat in his throat. His hair falling free of its tie and the inch of his trousers down his thighs instead of the whisper of skirts being pushed up, up…
And down was a better word for it, for him, anyway.
The cot creaking. The clinic dark. The corner quiet, except for each quick breath, a hurt that would never be healed—so long as the hands were his own.