Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A letter, if one could call it that, in shaky writing, lies folded upon the desk’s surface. It’s half-out of its envelope, easily readable to any who might be looking through the Inquisitor’s affects, as if it were intended to be found:

I know you’ve been reading my mail. Stop it.

On the envelope, instructions are included, presumably to whatever interloper uncovers it:

You have been compromised. Take what is enclosed to Fen’Harel directly.

The response, found soon after in the same place, is written on strange parchment in even stranger ink, faint green glimmers almost slipping off the finishes of the precise, pristine handwriting:

Inquisitor,

It is my regret to inform you that I cannot do that. While it operates, your order must be monitored, and I apologize for any violations to your privacy that I may incur. You will not see the agent who delivered this letter again. I think that we would both agree that it would be imprudent of him to remain on your cleaning staff.

If what I recall is correct, you wrote with your left hand. With that in mind, your penmanship is surprisingly good. The progress you seem to have made in working past any impediment I may have caused gladdens me. I wish that the loss of your arm had been the extent of the injuries that I inflicted upon you.

Solas

The words dance with quickness and an almost strange impulse coursing through some residual shimmer of feather-light magic radiating forth from the paper. Yet the folds of the stationery feel like intended finality. The Inquisitor can almost taste turmoil as she angrily crumples the letter in her clumsy right hand, a conflict of her own churning cruelly within her.

Chapter Text

Left in the soldier’s barracks to be found by any anonymous agent is a letter written shortly thereafter. It is folded somewhat clumsily inside its envelope, as if by a tired and aching hand. The letter reaches near-illegibility by the end:

Solas,

I sincerely appreciate your concern for my wellbeing, privacy, and, most importantly, penmanship. As always, your thoughtfulness and consideration bid a smile to my face. Such kindness remains an ever-shining beacon in these trying times—with your typical unshakeable optimism and faith in me, the functionality of my right hand will continue to improve!

Despite my better judgment, I find myself missing you quite sorely.

Your departure has left many a void in my life: I can’t find another person in the world who has your unique affinity for expounding upon how certain well-received theories of epistemology fail to account for interaction with the Fade, your impressive dedication to complaining about the very existence of tea, or even your disconcerting yet strangely endearing tendency not to care that certain articles of your clothing have caught fire.

Your absence has left me with a longing embedded deep within the core of my very being that has only continued to grow since we parted. Try as I might to assuage them alone, I fear that without you, I will be unable to placate these urges that haunt me. I am in pleading want of your physical presence—only you can give me the release I so desperately need.

Even now, my heart stirs in my chest and my right hand works restlessly at its task as I frantically fantasize about your desired proximity: I like to imagine that soon enough, I’ll be good enough with a longsword to cut your fucking head off.

Somberly and respectfully,

Inquisitor Lavellan

The formality that characterized its predecessor is lacking in the terse response upon the almost flushing paper that the Inquisitor found hastily slipped beneath her door mere hours after her own letter disappeared:

You are obscene, Inquisitor.

Lavellan can’t help but give a mirthful and unceremonious snort at the note. Though it is perhaps undeserved, it’s the first real laugh in a long while.

Chapter Text

Lavellan places a letter she wrote amidst the maps on the war table. They are addressed to a "Mr. Dread Wolf" residing in "The Void, Probably:"

Solas,

I really can't help myself sometimes.

Are we writing now? This entire situation is strange, as is your choice in stationery. Does it convey how you feel when you write upon it? I’d like some explanation on how it works but I doubt I could follow. I haven’t read anything on magical theory in some time, and you can attest to the fact that I never understood it all that well in the first place. As you might imagine, magical theory is sort of a fraught subject for me now. I didn’t start studying it for you, but let’s just say I was aware that my most practical application of such knowledge would be making conversation with handsome mages.

Anyways, I’m glad I can still make you blush.

Maybe you’re not so far gone after all,

Inquisitor Lavellan

Almost a week afterwards, another letter appeared upon the Inquisitor’s desk. The paper is plain and does not exude the magical glamour that had radiated from the prior notes:

Inquisitor,

Excuse my delay in response. I had to acquire more mundane stationery, as I felt that sympathetic page and ink were poor choices with which to write this letter. I do not want them to carry the impressions that they tend to carry. Under different circumstances, I would be more than happy to explain the process of emotional imprinting to you, but both the oddity of the situation and the hostility in your letter have been noted. 

I have parted with you twice now in an attempt to spare you at least a modicum of the pain that intimacy with me, emotional or otherwise, will cause. I loath to hurt you, vhenan. This correspondence should not continue.

While your words have borne no earnest joy, it has been good to hear from you.

Solas 

The handwriting of the response devolves into scribbles more quickly than her previous letters. Lavellan’s wavering lines are almost more indicative of her mental state than any magic could possibly be. He had called her last letter hostile. She would show him hostile:

Solas,

You are unbelievable, and I couldn’t care less if we spoke or not.

You loath to hurt me, you say. Well, it’s too late for that. I loved you and you destroyed me. I have had scores of men and women before you and never transcended affection for any of them. I had always discounted love to be the providence of the lucky and the beautiful, only to be proven wrong by some kindly apostate who each night wove me worlds anew. And to what end did I fall? 

You’ve lied to me in two tongues, treated me as a thing to be played with—I was a pawn in your game, worthless to you even as I sat at the top of the world. I’ve never felt lesser in my life than I did at your hands, not even in all the time I roved the Marches in ignominious misery. Of course you cannot imagine how that stings.

Let’s not even speak of your plans for all the world. I haven’t even recounted the entire list of your personal insults to me and I am already shaking. I despise you with the entirety of my being. So by all means, never write to me again. It’ll do you well to stop stoking the pyre of your own self-pity.

Dareth-shiral, jackass,

Lavellan

At least she is more eloquent angry. She doesn’t bother to put the paper in an envelope, or even send it to a courier. Instead, Lavellan descends from her quarters. She stalks across the castle lawn and confronts an elven soldier at his patrol, where he watches the drawbridge’s gears.  

“Josephine discovered long ago that you work for Fen’Harel,” the Inquisitor says with little pretense to the soldier, who glares back at his supposed superior. Lavellan hates that her adversary works mostly through elves. She hasn’t articulated it to anyone, and feels like it would make it worse if she did. “It’s why you were recalled from your forward scouting position to be stationed at this shitty job where we could watch you. Take this to your Dread Wolf—I don’t care what you do with yourself after that.”

Lavellan shoves the letter into the soldier’s hands. As the man nervously begins to walk across the drawbridge as other soldiers watch him questioningly, the Inquisitor wonders how she’s going to explain what she has just done to Josephine. Spies of Fen'Harel are difficult to locate. The soldier had been one of three that they had found in the entire Inquisition. The Antivan woman, desperately trying to fill Leliana’s void, had been tracking the soldier’s communications for weeks to limited avail, and Lavellan had tipped him off and let him loose over what essentially amounted to a lovers’ spat. Lavellan decides she’ll feign ignorance of the matter. She takes to the training yard, clumsily hacking at the dummies until blisters form on her right hand and she nearly collapses in frustrated exhaustion. 

Lavellan returns to her room hours later, soreness already seeping into her limbs. She finds a letter left at the door, dropped askew on the ground as if the messenger could not be rid of it soon enough:

Inquisitor,

As fond as I have been and will always be of you, there are times when you behave as a child would. The thoughtfulness with which you handle your political and intellectual affairs has never seemed to extend to your personal matters. I suggest you treat me as one of the former instead of the latter. What you have built will not last if you act with such foolishness, da’len. 

If you despise and pity me so, why have you engaged me? Do you wish to use words to further hurt me, to cut at where your blade can never reach? Perhaps I should not cast stones about acting upon emotional impulses. It was wrong of me to write to you—this correspondence was indeed ill-conceived.

As I do not need to be reminded of what pain I have inadvertently wrought, you would do better without the glimpses of me that these letters afford. We will not speak again, as long as you (or I) may live. Such congress will inevitably breed misery for us both. 

Dareth-shiral, Adahlen. Please believe that I wish you well. 

Solas

The Inquisitor does not write in response, and after a week she is able to tear his letters to pieces and cast them from her balcony into the wind. She would think of it as closure if she did not catch him watching her across the fragmented and hoary dreamscapes of her troubled sleep, deaf to her cries to him where she half cursed his name and hoped he died and half begged him to come near to her.

She does not know which would be worse.

Chapter Text

Nearly a year passes, and the Inquisitor stays busy navigating the still-stormy political clime. Uprisings, some violent and some not, rock the land over the reforms of Divine Victoria and it fell to her honor guard, the Inquisition, to keep the peace and protect the smallfolk. The Inquisition’s mining interests, tenuously held in its hands after the Exalted Council, come to Tevinter’s focus and magisters beg the organization for steel as the supply of weaponry bought from the dwarven holds of Orzammar and Kal-Shirok alone becomes insufficient to combat the Qunari. The shadow wars of Orlais’s governance rage beneath a gilded veneer, and every player in the grand Game turns to the Inquisition, even with its newly limited power, for support.

These issues are relatively easy for Inquisitor Lavellan to manage, especially with the help of her advisors. She’s always been fast to pick up patterns and see structure, to figure out how things worked and what to do about them. Her quickness was why her clan had sent her to the Conclave in the first place, after all. Comtes and marquises vying for Inquisition favor must prove themselves by bolstering Inquisition military interests in the name of Divine Victoria, and the organization’s coffers grow fat as it supports its own agenda against the Qun in the open war Tevinter wages. It is almost tidy.

An unmarked letter she had nearly overlooked in her daily slew of mail catches Lavellan's attention as she prepares to leave her chambers. She knows exactly who it is from:  

Inquisitor,

I should not be writing you, but I must laud your latest moves against me. I am unsure as to whether have spies within my ranks or if you simply presumed that my agents would collect artifacts and lesser foci from certain ruined temples, but I was certainly surprised, at first, to hear of the interference from your people.

I should have expected as much from you. I wish it did not have to be like this.

Solas 

P.S. The fruit baskets your people have placed in front of many of my eluvians have been particularly delightful. Though their placement is somewhat immature, they have made me laugh. The detail with which “FUCK YOU, SOLAS” is carved into all of the stone fruits is an especial favorite of mine. Thank you for not bothering to try and poison me.

Lavellan, at first, decides not to respond. However, hardly a day passes before a courier from a town at the foot of the Frostbacks approaches the Inquisitor in Skyhold. He carries a box of chocolate-covered strawberries, strangely fresh considering that the nearest field is half the continent away. When Lavellan asks him who paid the fare for the delivery, the courier pauses in confusion. “Sorry, your worship, but I don’t think I know. Someone in a hood. Elven, I think, though I might be making up seeing the ears under the cowl."

She does not want to believe what is happening.

The next day, Lavellan leaves her own unmarked envelope on the table of the tavern. The handwriting on the letter inside has considerably improved from that on the notes of the previous year, and the envelope soon vanishes:

Solas,

I have spies in your ranks. Kill and/or oust everyone, just to be safe. I’m not sure if you know this about me, but I actually run a very important and powerful private army, and thus I am qualified to give advice on the matter.

Admittedly, you make infiltration rather hard—many of the cells have absolutely no knowledge of your other operatives. You’re good at this. I have a lot to learn from you.

You know very well that I’m allergic to strawberries, so fuck you, Solas, for the laziest poisoning attempt ever,

Inquisitor Lavellan

The same courier intercepts her on the lawn of the castle a few days later bearing a box of Starkhaven toffees that, according to the artisan’s label, had been packaged just two days before. Clearly, the sweets had not gone through the typical channels of import.

“Let me guess. A hooded elf dropped it off,” The Inquisitor says exasperatedly. She wishes she hadn’t started this by leaving the baskets of fruit.  

“Right,” the courier replies as Lavellan fumbles in her pocket for a tip. “Not the same one as before, though. At least I don’t think.”  

Lavellan brings the box of toffees to her room, and reads the note affixed:

Inquisitor,

I forgot you were allergic. Honestly, it is the sort of thing that tends to slip my mind. There has been much weighing upon me as of late.

For instance, the issue of your spies. I will not be following your “advice” on the matter, though I must reconsider whom I take on as an agent. Many of The People are steadfast and loyal to you still. 

And why shouldn’t they be? Elves have benefitted immensely and concretely under the influence of the Inquisition, and I promise only a world that my agents personally may not even survive to see. I have said before that I believe in action and consequence—if that is what shapes the world, it makes sense for one to follow you. It is also very hard to recruit any of the Dalish to my side, for more than one obvious reason.

You impress me, lethallan. You always have.

Solas

Lavellan sighs. She looks at the toffees in the box and shakes her head slightly before taking a piece.

Nailed in a sealed envelope to the frame of an eluvian originally found by Inquisition agents in the recesses of a library of the University of Orlais, but removed at an alarming speed to a particularly unpleasant and inhospitable part of the arid Western Approach:

Solas,

You didn’t have to buy me candy. You’ve already given me the incomparable gift of faith!

Until our experiences at the temple of Mythal, I thought the elven pantheon to be entirely mythical. The idea that the beings that my clan had called gods were anything other than tall-tales was entirely new to me. 

I’ve since discovered that one of my people’s “deities,” has, in fact, personally touched my life. I don’t need to detail all the Dread Wolf has done for me in this letter (because that list would be both lengthy and sexually explicit), but I’m certain that my life would be quite different if not for his decidedly unblessed intervention.

I never believed there were gods or anything of the sort to answer me, but I know now that when I ask something of Fen’Harel, he will at least read it if I submit it to him in writing.

Piously yours,

Inquisitor Lavellan

P.S. You might want to advise whoever’s working for you to pay attention to how Cullen folds his troop movement charts so it’s not obvious that they’ve gone through them. I’m only tipping you off on this one because our Commander is so particular that there are least forty other tells to him about when someone’s gone through his things. You might be best to instruct your agent to observe Sera and make the meddling look like her doing when she’s in town, but that might not work—her methods are too distinctive and irregular to convincingly feign.

P.P.S. Thank you for the toffee. It’s very good.

The last line is very quickly and nervously scribbled, as if fatigue is returning once more to Lavellan’s increasingly practiced right hand. It seems that the two sentences of sincere gratitude were more draining to write than the entire rest of the letter.

The courier doesn't come again, but a large raven lands in the Inquisition’s rookery bearing a box for the Inquisitor, as if the sender thought the contents were too sensitive to trust to a sentient messenger.  

Within an envelope affixed:

Inquisitor,

Piously mine? You write in jest, but I do not particularly wish to own anyone, least of all you. I suppose your strange faith is indeed rewarded: The Dread Wolf procures stationery for your sake alone.

I have been thinking on the subject of gifts, and that has caused me to reflect upon the day I told you the truth of the vallaslin. I was disappointed that you refused its removal, but have always understood your reasoning. Your joking aside, you have always been rather atheistic. You had never borne the vallaslin for the Evanuris or what time had warped them into, only as a physical illustration of your own experiences.

Would you have accepted my gift if you knew then what you knew now, I wonder? I think you might be able to imagine why it was difficult for me to look upon a lover who bears the marks of subservience. Even before I withdrew from society and began my war with the Evanuris, I considered it wrongful to lay with a slave—what choice would she have as to the matter? 

Yet I knew well that you were no slave. You in every way defied my millennia of context, but an odd shame would find me when I slipped each night into the Fade. Spirits formed of wisdom and courage would castigate me for my misdeeds, rebuking me as I reached for them. My regrets and their reprimands were never about the vallaslin, but it helped me to pretend. It was far easier to mourn the eroded shadows of ills long lost to time instead of accepting the true wrongs I did by you, even as I slept in your arms.

But what is done is done, and I apologize. I would have liked to see the blood writing gone, but there was never anything to free you from.

I found your other concern about the issue to be somewhat less substantive. Your nose likely would not have looked any more crooked without the tattoos. Even if it had, I would have liked it all the same. I suppose that does not matter now, if it ever did at all.

Perhaps I do a poor job of giving gifts. I thought you deserved something more than sweets.

Solas

A strange sickness finds Lavellan, and she does not know how to respond. Weak-kneed, she looks to the box that the letter had come with. She does not want to open it, but does so tentatively, not knowing what to expect within.  

Inside is a necklace made from twine wrapped about the jawbone of a wolf. It is undoubtedly Solas’s own piece. Lavellan is of half a mind to throw it from her balcony.

Chapter Text

It’s raining in Val Royeaux, but Lavellan does not mind as she sits behind the glass window of a café, organizing her notes for the upcoming meeting with Divine Victoria that brought her to the city. The Inquisition is holding the confiscated land of a baroness who had tried to have the Divine assassinated, and the property’s future ownership must be discussed.

Half of the eyes in the room are trained upon Lavellan—a well-dressed Dalish woman in one of the Orlesian capitol’s most decadent salons could only be the Inquisitor. Lavellan wonders which masks hide more than just curiosity. Which eyes pry, she wants to know, and for whom? Lavellan stands to walk to the shop’s counter, abandoning her papers at the table. Unthinkingly, she rubs the juncture where her inert prosthesis is strapped to the stump of her arm under her layered clothing. She does not think she will ever grow used to it.

The Inquisitor stands by the case of deserts, peering not at the petit-fours and pear tarts but at the reflection of her seat in the glass. Her hand idly floats from her false limb to her chest, where a piece of wolf’s bone is tethered around her neck beneath the lined vest meant to shield her from the chill. The gift bothers her less when she keeps it on her. Around her neck, it is nothing more than jewelry.

An elven server lingers too long in clearing a plate with crumbs on it from Lavellan’s table, her eyes seemingly cast downward at the strewn papers. The woman is unfocused on her surroundings, however, and Lavellan is able to slip back to the table and grab her by the elbow as the server begins to walk away.

“Sit down and pretend that we are speaking as friends,” Lavellan whispers with a hiss, “or I will call the whole of the guard down upon you.” The Inquisitor leans in and gives the woman a small hug as if she had known her for some time.

“Y-yes, my lady,” the server answers as she sinks in to the table’s other chair. The server’s eyes flit around the room, uncomfortably realizing that she is locked in the whole of the patronage’s peripheries.

“Who are you working for?” Lavellan asks as she slips back into her own seat. She speaks coolly and moves casually as not to draw the attention of the other diners. She has already made too much of a show. The woman looks nervous, miserable, and ashamed. She is clearly not a trained spy—no noble would trust her with affairs of state. "Are you selling information freelance? Or are you a spy of Fen'Harel?"

The server’s unhappy glance downwards betrays the answer, and Lavellan lets out a sigh. “Of course.” She takes a clean piece of paper and writes:

Solas,

Whatever happened to never speaking again as long as we might live? Because we’re speaking again, and as far as I know, neither of us is dead.

Or do you write to me from beyond the grave?,
Inquisitor Lavellan

Lavellan drops her pen to hand the letter to the unfortunate spy. “You can go. Give this to him,” she says under her breath, and adds for the whole of the room, “It was good to see you again. It has been so many years. To think how our fortunes have changed!”

Later in the day at a guest manse outside the city limits, Lavellan’s desk begets the response, which doesn’t touch on her question at all:

Inquisitor,

I have a matter that I wish to discuss with you. I am proposing a temporary partnership of sorts—there is a matter along the border of Tevinter and Nevarra that it would be best for your Inquisition to handle.

My purview within the Imperium is limited, for obvious reasons, but agents of mine in Nevarra have uncovered a conspiracy in which a handful of magisters and a small constituency of Nevarrans plot to escalate an existing crisis over the usage of a waterway into open hostilities so troops under the command of certain mortalitassi noblemen can occupy a swath of border area. Once their troops are stationed there, the mortalitassi mages intend to defect to the Imperium along with the held Nevarran territory. They seem to think they will be given seats in the magisterium.

This is troublesome to me for two reasons: I dislike the Imperium and all it stands for and would not see it return to expansionism in these coming years, and renewed conflict with Nevarra will undoubtedly weaken the Imperium’s efforts against the Qun. I do not want the particular brand of subservience that either nation impresses to be spread beyond their respective borders.

If I give you what information I have, will you find some way to act on this? Surely Lady Montilyet could do something to diffuse the tensions before the issue of troops is even raised. I considered the possibility of seeding you this information anonymously, but after the incident at the Winter Palace, I have determined that being upfront with you might mitigate the chances of unforeseen complications arising.

Solas

She is partially relieved that he did not truly write in answer.

That evening, Lavellan walks the lush gardens of the estate with a very frazzled but energized Leliana. The two talk mainly about Chantry politics, but personal words of concern slip in to the Divine's conversation.

"How are you, truly?" Leliana asks, seeming calmer than in her prior conversation. "The last we honestly spoke was shortly after the Exalted Council. Both personally and professionally, that was a very hard time for you. I recall that the Commander was concerned about your drinking."

"Ah, yes. You know it's bad when Cullen has room to speak on your substance use," Lavellan says. She immediately regrets the joke. Cullen hasn't touched a drop of lyrium for years and deserves more respect than her comment had afforded him, but Leliana's inquiry had cut too close to home. "Sorry, it was wrong of me to say that. But yes, that period was very difficult, but I'm doing better now. I think I lost my direction for a few months."

"I know that feeling all too well," Leliana says, bowing her head slightly. "You were with me while I wrestled with my crisis of faith, and I wish I could more often be present to help you in your own struggle."

Lavellan shakes her head. "Thank you, Leliana, but I believe I'm through it."

"Oh? Forgive me for saying so, but I believe otherwise. I may not be able to read your mail to Solas, but I know that it is being sent." Leliana cannot hide a small smirk. Of course she'd figure this out as she watched who came and went. Lavellan does not have time to ask Leliana how she feels about the development. "You know to be careful when playing with fire. If I were you, Inquisitor, I would use the channel of contact to our best advantage."

Later in the night, Lavellan quickly pens another letter:

Solas,

So you got back in contact with me to talk business? All right, I’ll take it.

As much as I hate to do your bidding, this sounds like something I should look into. Arrange some sort of way to get whatever information you have to us. Pass this off somehow to one of my spies in Nevarra, make them think they uncovered it organically. I’ll speak to Dorian on the matter, too. He might know what the Magisterium’s stance on the Nevarran waterway issue is.

I haven’t told anyone that we've been writing. I’m sure they would all think me insane. I think I’m insane.

I can’t believe I’m doing this,
Inquisitor Lavellan

She leaves it on a low table in the manse's library and goes to the balcony in her quarters to watch the stars rise alone. When she walks back through the chamber, the letter is gone.

A week later, Lavellan is still in Val Royeaux. Between sending mail about the issue with Nevarra and Tevinter and working through Chantry squabbles, Lavellan is tried and overtaxed. She doesn't mind it so much. Anyways, Leliana is much more busy than Lavellan is, and the elven woman hardly sees the Divine. This gives her more breadth to do as she wishes. Between meetings to distribute the dispossessed baronness’s holdings, Lavellan writes another a letter and leaves it clasped in the hand of a statue of Hessarian, forcing the envelope into the space between the pommel of blade and his marble grip. The letter is longer than necessary, as Lavellan hadn’t quite been able to stop writing it, even when she caught herself lapsing into a strange sincerity:

Solas,

Your information has been confirmed. I’m sure you already know what Josephine is doing about the Nevarran/Tevinter issue, and Dorian is trying to preemptively dissuade the rest of the Magisterium from focusing on the Nevarran border. That’s all I’ll say of the matter. I’m not entirely certain that this isn’t some ploy to extract further information from me.

Since Leliana has removed herself to the Sunburst Throne, we’ve found ourselves in need of an in-house spymaster, and you’re actually pretty good at this sort of thing. Have you ever considered not tearing down the Veil and casting the world into chaos and darkness? Because if you decided against that and wanted to come back to the Inquisition, we would certainly be willing to consider you for the vacant position.

You can even have your old office back, if you want. Your mural is still there, though we have debated painting it over with something less creepy. I also promise not to work out my remaining frustration with you by running you through with a longsword, sort of because one shouldn't resort to violence, but mostly because I wouldn't stand a chance against you. I’m getting passable with a blade in my right hand, though. I’ve even been playing around with the idea of using a metal fake hand defensively. I'm not sure if it's actually workable.

Enough about swordplay. I’m sure such talk bores you. If you came back, maybe we could go on adventures again one day. We’d have to get everyone that we possibly could to return. We could probably swing that for one excursion, right? I’m certain that I could smooth things over with our friends about you. I actually think that Vivienne, secretly at least, might like you more now than she did before.

I will warn you upfront, however, that if you get the spymaster job, there will likely be a problem with your retirement package. You seem to be immortal, and I’m not entirely sure how we would make your pension work.

Send us your resume,
Inquisitor Lavellan

Chapter Text

The response is waiting for the Inquisitor upon her return to Skyhold, though she at first does not notice it on her desk.

Lavellan isn’t the one who grabs it. “What’ve we got here? Unmarked envelope, still sealed. Not Inquisition wax here—wrong color. So what’s it? Does the Lady Inquisitor have someone Inquisiting her and her lady parts?” Sera peers at what she holds, and everything within Lavellan freezes in terror.

“Sera, put that down. Please!” Lavellan blanches. She is certain that Sera would hate her if she knew the truth of the matter. At once, she knows that she should tell Sera anyways. It would be the best thing of her.

“Someone is Inquisiting you!” Sera exclaims with a laugh. Before Lavellan can concede her shame, the rogue promptly drops the envelope back on to the desk. “Ugh, love letters are so boring! Well, at least this nob’s got to be better than the last one you had, yeah? Literally has to be! Stupid weird elfy stuff gone stupid friggin’ worse somehow. He was always a bit of a tit, Solas, I mean, if you ask me.”

“Oh, he’s a complete tit,” Lavellan says, walking to collect the envelope and slip it into her vest for safekeeping, careful not to expose the wolf's bone necklace she has often found herself wearing. She’d tell Sera eventually, she decided, when she had the whole mess sorted out. “So, you wanted to tell me about something those Tantervale Jennies found in the wreckage after that fire in the city cisterns?" 

Lavellan reads the letter after Sera slinks away to the undercroft to see her Widdle. The Inquisitor is both frustrated and relieved by the letter's brevity:

Inquisitor,

The words you have had for me as of late have been rather glib. How do you fare, truly? I cannot imagine that you are well.

I would hate to think that I have precluded you from living a happy life.

Solas

It is short and enormously heavy at once, and Lavellan dislikes herself for having hidden it.

Lavellan writes back immediately, and leaves the envelope on the tavern table:

Fenehdis lasa, Solas,

None of this is easy for me.

How would you have me deal with this mess? Do you want me to move on? Find happiness, whatever that is, with another? It would be unfair of me to call another my love when you still haunt my thoughts. I cannot excise you from my mind, but don’t flatter yourself.

You’re forced into my sights each day when I discuss Inquisition business with Josephine and Cullen. As I work to counter your interests, I have to do my best to anticipate your thinking in attempt to predict your movements. Each time we catch one of your spies, I’m made aware of the fact that you are watching me. And don’t think that I don’t know of what (or rather, whom) lurks around the edges of my dreams. You are omnipresent to me, and I cannot just forget you.

I don’t think it matters if we talk or not. You have already marked me irrevocably. But I’m curious. I’ve asked you this before, and you didn’t answer: Why did you even start writing me again?

I await your response.

Inquisitor Lavellan

Only a few days pass, but it feels like an eternity in which Lavellan waits. She feels stupid for hanging on a man’s words in such a way. It makes it marginally better that Solas is more of a ‘nemesis’ than an ‘ex-boyfriend,' but not really. At least she finds the next letter herself:

Inquisitor, 

It seems that our predicaments are not dissimilar. We are, in essence, at war. In absence of land for your armies to seize and hold, you have occupied my thoughts.

I had hoped to harden my heart. I thought distance and desistance might be enough, but I cannot keep myself from thinking of you. Perhaps it was the produce marred with obscenities—a cocky, unnecessary gesture if there ever was one, paired with a rebuke of my activities— that called me to reach out once more. You are nearly as arrogant as you are brilliant, Inquisitor, and I am almost troubled by how utterly irresistible I find that.

It is not just on principle that I am bothered. I am afraid my lack of restraint will only serve to harm us both. It is unwise and cruel of me to write to you, just as it was unwise of me to allow myself to kiss you and cruel of me to justify finding my way into your bed time and time again. Ir abelas, truly. My judgment has always failed me when it has come to you. 

When civil, this correspondence has been the sole pleasure of my days. Even much of the Fade has soured in reaction to my thoughts. As is proper, I suppose. I should not seek any pleasure at all, for I walk a path of death. Such indulgences shall only make my arrival at my destination more painful, yet there are times that I wish it could be otherwise. To touch you and hold you again, I would willingly accept all the suffering in the world unto myself, but it would not be my own heart that I would be gambling with.

Solas 

Lavellan shakes slightly as she reads it, and she does not know how to respond. She wants to tear it up into a thousand pieces and never write to him again, but cannot bring herself to do so.

 It’s been a week and a half and Sera has headed to Tantervale to do…well, Lavellan doesn’t really understand what Sera is supposed to do in Tantervale, or how a cistern even caught fire in the first place, but she trusts Sera to get whatever job she had in mind done. She did not tell Sera of the letters she exchanged with Solas, and felt rotten for it. Lavellan wanted to be alone as she walked the ramparts, but found herself with more company.

“I’d heard you were here. I’m sorry that I didn’t come find you earlier, Cole,” Lavellan offers to her companion. She has missed him, but he is the last person that she wants to see. She can't hide her thoughts from him the way she can hide incriminating letters or an incredibly distinctive necklace from Sera.

“I know. It’s all right because you’re here now. We both are,” he answers with an airy smile. “Maryden and I are headed somewhere new next, but she wanted to go back to play at the Herald’s Rest for just a few nights. She misses it here—strings strumming, she stirs them. Silent, sitting, until they stand, or sing, or stand and sing, swaying, swelling, sometimes soft and sometimes strong. She sings the songs the best, but she likes it better when she’s not the sole singer. I like it when everyone sings along, too.”

“I suppose that everyone here does know her repertoire,” Lavellan laughs, and for a while, the two stare out over the moon-bathed mountain valleys in quiet. An almost astringent blueness permeates the air.

“You’re hurting. I’m not sure how to help,” Cole says. “I sometimes get it wrong, and I can’t start over anymore. Do you want me to try?”

This was what Lavellan feared of him, and the chill of the night settles between the two. She felt bad that he likely knew of her trepidation. “Go ahead,” she answers, and Cole responds in a facsimile of her voice.

“I can make myself bigger than all of it, erring arrogance, he says and I know, but it’s all I’ve ever held. Fuck ‘fate,’ I have fought for it all. Victory, vindication, validation.” His timbre changes, and Cole continues, “You know who and what you are because of what you can do. And you don’t know what to do or what you even can do about him. Sometimes it reminds you of the body in the flowerbed. You always knew that you couldn’t have saved her, you were just a child. And that was the worst of it. You thought that you would never have to feel that way again, but he makes you, and you hate it. You wish you could just hate him.” Cole’s tone again switches again to emulate a voice somewhere inside of Lavellan, but he’s gentler than anything within her. “Let me hurt myself, Solas. Don’t make that choice for me.”

The Inquisitor is silent, and her good hand finds itself once more rubbing the juncture where her prosthesis is strapped to what remains of her arm. Cole’s lips move, and it looks like he is swallowing words. “Just say it, Cole.”

“Even if the words cause you more pain?” 

Lavellan grimaces. “I guess that’s why it’s important to hear them.”

“Yes. Sometimes, some places, I still hear him. It might be because of the eluvians everywhere. Echoes off everything, evident, close and yet not coming close at all, far and farther still but here, I hear. Solas loves you, Adahlen. It makes him as sick as it makes you.”

There is sweat on her forehead, and the wind turns it cold. She isn't happy with the information, not necessarily. “Thank you," Lavellan says finally.

The two walk for a while longer. After a silence, Cole begins to speak again, this time about himself and his new experiences. He has been in the world for some time, but so much of it is still shining to him.

He tells Lavellan that at first he was afraid that Maryden would hurt because he did not want her like other people wanted people they loved, but he discovered that she was happy with just kisses on her forehead and his hand on her own. He’s glad there are so many ways to be human and that being almost all human makes helping different. He’s not sure if it’s better, but he doesn’t feel like it’s a bad different. Cole says that he’s happy, and Lavellan feels as if she has at least done some small right, miniscule but tangible, by the boy. She wonders if he’s still trying to help her.

Later yet in the evening, She sits at her writing desk when she returns to her chambers and closes her eyes for a moment before she begins to write:

Solas,

Do me a favor and stop feeling sorry for yourself. It pisses me off to no end. So you’re going to do something genuinely awful. And by genuinely awful, I mean so awful that even the Blight itself aspires to its level of awfulness. I get it. Knowing that you feel bad does literally nothing to make me less upset with you. 

What I said all those letters ago about loathing you with my whole being is entirely true, but it’s not the entire truth. Despite everything, I still love you. I can’t really reconcile it, and it’s difficult to navigate. One fact keeps me sane, and it’s that I’m going to stop you.

I intend to save the world from you, and you from yourself, emma lath. Maybe it’s arrogant to think I can manage that. I am after all pitted against, in some twisted sense, a god. (How does that keep happening to me, I wonder?) I don’t care how bad my odds are. I’ve never accomplished a thing in this world by accepting powerlessness and helplessness. 

In the off chance that this goes poorly for me, I’ll be devastated and dead regardless of whether or not you write me letters. It infuriates me when you make decisions for me in an attempt to spare me pain. Let me gamble my heart myself: as unhappy as it makes me sometimes, if you would like to write to me, I would like to write to you. Just stop telling me how sorry you are. 

This easily is the stupidest thing I’ve done today,

Adahlen

Lavellan abandons the letter on the stairs to her room, and is tempted to recall it many times over the course of the very long night. For better or for worse (and almost certainly, it is for worse) she does not, and eventually slips into fitful sleep.

The same place begets a response, bright and early in the dawn of the next day:

Adahlen,

If this is part of some strategy to dissuade me from my path, it is sadly misguided. Even you cannot change my mind, though you are the sole thing to have ever given me pause. 

Still, your confidence is heartening. Despite the fruitlessness of this all and the likelihood that we will both use this against one another, I would very much like to stay in contact for the time being. I still fear that this will make matters worse for the two of us when we both inevitably come to ruin—eventually I will have to strip myself of the last vestiges of conscience and self, and I suppose that I shall abandon the pen at that time. Until then, however, I must admit that I am both horrified and perversely delighted with the idea of doing something so foolish for the sake of love. 

For your sake, I shall attempt to be less taciturn in my future writings. I truly look forward to hearing from you, vhenan. 

Solas

Chapter Text

Mundaneness and strangeness blend jarringly over the course of the next few weeks. As per their ill-conceived agreement, Lavellan leaves letters for Solas around the castle detailing the more boring events of her life. She is careful to include nothing of import. Whoever is delivering them is fast, and sometimes they exchange many letters over the course of a single day. Lavellan never catches anyone in the process of coming or going, but she is starting to deduce which of the servers and soldiers in Skyhold leak her words.

Lavellan’s letters to Solas are more than civil, and begin to betray an old warmth. She signs, however, with her title instead of her name, and he addresses her in kind. It implies a certain sort of distance that Lavellan can trick herself into being comfortable with. When Solas writes her back, he says he cannot tell her where he is or what he is doing, but he never lacks for words. Even though his visions seem grimmer and grimmer with each exchange, he goes on unendingly about his wanderings in the Fade and his congress with spirits. Solas is still just Solas in some ways.

Solas questions Lavellan about their friends, poorly attempting to feign a distanced disinterest as he pries. Lavellan is certain that he misses them all—Varric and his stories, Cassandra and her brusqueness, Cole. He misses Sera, even, and Dorian, Blackwall, Bull. She’s not so certain how he feels about Vivienne, but he does ask after her. Lavellan pays watchful attention to what she says of them all.

Lavellan does not put it above Solas to use her letters as a source of intelligence. She is, after all, attempting to do the same of him, but with little luck. He’s as careful as she is to avoid revealing anything that she can use against him. Even without extracting information from her ex-lover, Lavellan has a strategy for their shadowy war. It’s what takes her, personally, from Skyhold to Kirkwall, as she cannot trust anyone with her task:

Solas,

Though I’m certain you already know because you’re constantly spying on me, I have been travelling. Sorry for not writing more while on the road. I’ve taken to the study of charters and constitutions, and that has occupied much of my attention. I figure it’ll make me better about writing Inquisition policy.

I just got into Kirkwall on Inquisition business—I am negotiating the particulars of official secular support for the edicts of Divine Victoria and securing funding for the Inquisition’s interests in the Marches from the Viscount. Except the Viscount is Varric, so we just took fifteen minutes to sign a bunch of papers and have just been roaming about the city drinking ever since.

It occurs to me that I’ve only seen you drunk once, and that was at the Winter Palace. If you’re ever up to it, you should pop through one of your mirrors into Lowtown and grab a pint or seven with Varric and me. We could relive your favorite memories of being with the Inquisition, which I am imagining are all the times I woke you up late in the night to drunkenly demand your attention and affection while smelling and likely tasting of stale booze.

In accordance with everything I have heard, ever, this city is a complete shithole. Did you know that Kirkwall is the arson capitol of Thedas? Because it’s the arson capitol of Thedas, the water contamination capital of Thedas, the mugging capitol of Thedas, the abandoned foundry capitol of Thedas, the asbestos capitol of Thedas, and, probably relatedly, the lung disease capitol of Thedas. Still, Varric’s been doing some good by the place. The markets in both Hightown and Lowtown are busy, and the docks see many trade ships.

I was hoping to meet more of Hawke’s friends, but it seems they’ve all moved on aside from the Guard Captain. She’s nice enough, and apparently just discovered that she’s pregnant. Varric keeps trying to wrest the naming rights for the child away from her and her husband.

Varric and I talked about you. I would say ‘All good things, don’t worry,’ but that would be a blatant lie. I regret to inform you that Viscount Tethras and I have had no choice but to implicate you in every Theodosian conspiracy theory, ever.

Sure, you claimed to have been asleep for the last few thousand years, but you also lied to us about your entire identity. Our favorite possibility is that the second half of the Black Age and the whole of the Exalted Age did not actually happen, but you invented them and their major players and then forged historical records for your own nefarious plans—potentially to seed specific conflicts in the Chantry and other governing bodies and usher in the end of time. We also have yet to confirm that you weren’t involved in every dam rupture ever, and that you haven’t been tampering with municipal elections in Hossberg for the past few hundred years.

The truth is out there, and Varric and I are on to you.

I also may have told him that we were in contact. Varric says he can’t help but love it in theory. Our tragic romance does have a certain flourish to it. In practice, he thinks this could go wrong too easily. I told him that we both agreed with the sentiment.

Still cautiously,

Inquisitor Lavellan

Lavellan actually throws the unmarked letter from the window of the viscount’s manor and into the dark abyss of the alleyway.

“So, you think that’s going to actually get to Chuckles that way?” Varric asks as the letter wafts downwards on the coastal winds.

“Oh, I leave them out all over Skyhold to figure out where his people are snooping around. Sometimes I have to go and move them if no one picks them up,” Lavellan shrugs. “I’m not sure if he’s instructed people to deliberately leave them to make a space seem safe, though. I’m almost certain it’ll be in his hands by tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Maybe that works in Skyhold, but you’re in Kirkwall now. That letter’ll probably be stolen and pawned as kindling to some prospective arsonist before it even hits the ground,” the dwarf explains. He turns and looks to the open window, resting his elbow on the low sill. “You know, the arson rate per capita has actually gone down over the last few months. I wish Hawke was here to see all this. Kirkwall, I mean.”

“Hawke would be proud of you and what you’ve done,” Lavellan starts. She had only known Hawke briefly, but she is sure of the statement’s truth. “I’m sorry, Varric. If only I’d—“

“Ah, quit it, Lavellan. Of course it still bothers me, but what happened happened, and there’s no point in going nuts over it when there’s still so much shit to do. I’ve got a city to rule and you’re dealing with the worst break-up ever.”

“Solas is literally trying to destroy the world and you’re calling it a break-up?” With a small huff, Lavellan airs her biggest problem with the descriptor: “We officially ended it a long time ago.”

Varric gives a small laugh. “Oh, you say that, but it’s still happening. You and Chuckles are at that weird stage right now where you keep on getting in contact with one another and try to sort things out because you either want to make it work again or get some closure, but it won’t work because it didn’t work the first time and closure is a myth. Come on, let’s go get some drinks. You’re here to have fun, right? If we’re lucky, we can get to Lowtown before all the muggers disguised as rodeo clowns come out.”

The next day, a very hung-over Lavellan triumphantly and groggily presents an envelope left at her door to Varric before withdrawing into the relative quiet darkness of her quarters to read its contents:

Inquisitor,

It is good to hear from you. I was beginning to fear that you reconsidered our arrangement. Perhaps it would be a relief in the long run if you did, but at your request, I will try not to dwell on that matter.

I am flattered that you think that I am some sort of undying puppet-master, but you have overestimated the range of my activities. I can assure you that I am not responsible for any aberrations in the current calendar, or for that matter, any faults in the structural integrity of the continent’s levies. As for fixing elections in the Anderfels, do you truly think I would suffer the presence of Weisshaupt in a nation that I controlled?

Regarding your sojourns, I have visited Kirkwall in my dreams. I believe that the city also holds records for industrial accidents, botched executions, boating deaths, and the length of time it takes to remove a reported horse carcass from the street. Even in the Fade the city exudes a strange and sinking woe, the wails of a thousand widows layered upon elegies of loss and longing. The Veil is tenuously thin throughout Kirkwall from the perpetual violence performed on and by the citizenry. I do not care to linger in a space where centuries of misery have had time to permeate and mar every aspect of existence.

It sounds like there is reason to believe that Master Tethras’s tenure will be more auspicious for the people of the city. I am glad to hear this. As there has always been great sadness there, there have always been myriad spirits of hope woven into Kirkwall’s architecture.

I, as unfortunately as ever, cannot tell you to where I wander or provide you with concise details about that which I do. Vaguely speaking, I am studying the magic necessary to complete my endeavors. Tearing the Veil down will require different mechanisms than erecting it: imagine throwing paint at a wall. It is easy enough to splatter the paint everywhere in a single splash, but cleaning it off is not so simple or quick. It would require manual labor, a series of alchemical compounds, and perhaps even attention to the nooks and crannies of the masonry. It is much like that with the Veil. This is, of course, a simplified explanation. I also suppose that is also a rather antiseptic metaphor for such a lurid task.

It is too easy to tell you too much, lethallan. I hope your travels remain pleasant.

Solas

P.S. Even if my circumstances allowed me to, I would decline your invitation to drink with you and Master Tethras. There is a reason that, aside from that one unfortunate slip-up of mine, that I have never allowed you or any of the Inquisition to see me intoxicated.

You have described yourself to me before as a sloppy drunk, and I must admit that in my experience, you speak the truth of the matter. I have never exactly begrudged you for this, even when you would appear in my quarters and tear me from the Fade at three in the morning to pepper me with whiskey-flavored kisses.

I have not forgotten, my heart, that you hate it when I say “as a young man,” as it makes me sound too old for you. (To add a caveat, I have never lied to you about my age, seeing as you asked me to spare you further details after I confirmed I was older than forty-five.) Thus I apologize sincerely for the following: As a young man, I too tended to imbibe in excess and behave quite carelessly when I did so. There is no reason for me to believe that I would have behaved differently under the influence after the ages I spent dreaming, and thus I chose to abstain while with the Inquisition. I could have revealed to you too much of my true nature while in an altered state of mind, or worse, embarrassed myself in front of everyone.

If you would allow me a moment of reminiscence to the era of Elvhenan, I would take it. I had many bad experiences when my social obligations brought me into contact with the Evanuris. I convinced myself that I had to drink quite heavily to stand most of them, but alcohol often made my animosity worse. One evening I nearly began a war by drunkenly vomiting in some urn that Falon’Din prized too dearly—the thing did have some useful enchantment placed upon it, but I cannot for the life of me recall what it was.

It was quite a different time back then, and I wish there was a way that I could explain it to you in its entirety. Someone as bright and ambitious as yourself would have done well in the best circles of Elvhenan, and I imagine that you would have quite liked the universities and salons. You might have also enjoyed the fact that I had a full head of hair at the time.

Lavellan cannot help but gently smile at the end of his post-script, but soon her mood sours as she reviews the rest of the letter. She wishes that his interest in the removal of the Veil was merely academic—Solas was always happiest when he was learning, but Lavellan can tell that he derives no joy from his research. As always, his evident misery makes her feel no better. Lavellan takes relief in knowing that she will stop Solas. It is, after all, the true reason she has come to Kirkwall.

Chapter Text

Impatient and still hungover, Lavellan has a day yet before she can advance her plan, and she passes her time in Kirkwall pouring over various charters from the city-state’s history, all horrendously drafted, and languidly writing while Varric is busy. She strangely appreciates the slow day:

Solas,

I think that baldness rather suits you. The aesthetic of the clean-shaven mystic carries a profound dignity with it that displays a certain solemn gravity. That being said, I would be totally into it if your drapes matched your carpet.

If you have time between monitoring my organization and trying to kill literally everyone, could you at some point communicate to me exactly what you did in Arlathan? Like any good Dalish girl, I know all of the tales of the Dread Wolf, slander though they may be. For what it’s worth, you really do have the best stories—even if the character we made you into was an evil one, there was a certain cunning audacity to him that I admired even as a kid.

I think I wove a lot of the personality of the myth into who I was growing up, partially knowingly, partially unconsciously. I mean, I was never actually religious, but stories where the trickster "hero" got what he wanted with cunning, knowledge, and bravado stuck with me. Being tough and knowing how to swing a sword can only get you so far in a world that's poisoned against you for what you are. I had to find a new way to navigate my surroundings. So I gathered what information I could about everything my limited imagination could conceive of, and acted as if I had nothing in the world to be afraid of. It’s what made me good at dealing with humans, which, incidentally, is why I was sent to the Conclave.

So, basically, it’s your fault that I ended up in a situation that was entirely your fault, which has embroiled me in a conflict that is, once more, your fault. My whole relationship with you is terrifying and forces me to call into question the authenticity of my being.

And that’s why I choose not to dwell on it. I like to think that I’m ‘me,’ whatever that means, and don’t want to deal with that sort of existential despair, not while there is a world at stake. Maybe when I retire I’ll have time to ponder it and fall to pieces. So. Tell me about who you were back in the days of Elvhenan. I take it from how you’ve spoken that you weren’t quite one of the Evanuris, but you seem to have known them well.

I’m waiting for you to expound,
Inquisitor Lavellan

Lavellan leaves the letter outside of her door, and lays down for a nap. She still has a headache, and is eager to go back to sleep. Alcohol and its after-affects are among the only things that make Lavellan want to lay her head down. Attempting to deaden herself to the vestiges of the Fade her mind managed to touch in its dreams had fueled her disconcerting period of alcohol use after the Exalted Council.

Lavellan does not rest for long, but her letter is replaced by a relatively thick envelope when she leaves the room. Without bothering to reattach her prosthesis, she gathers it up into her pocket and goes to speak to the guard that waits at the door of the viscount’s manor.

“Captain,” the Inquisitor greets. “Has anyone passed you by?” Her letters never vanished while watched—Lavellan had most certainly tried to catch Solas’s spies that way. She’d had better luck monitoring their escape routes, and had personally identified many of Skyhold’s leaks in such a manner. Lavellan had yet to turn the names over to Josephine and Cullen, as she hadn’t quite confessed her correspondence to the two and they would undoubtedly ask questions about her sources.

Lavellan has allowed a relative stranger to know more about her secret correspondence than she has her advisers. It’s because the Guard Captain, who stands in the doorway with her arms crossed, has never had the chance to trust her enough to feel betrayed by her actions. “No, Your Worship.” Aveline seems half-convinced by the title, and Lavellan cannot tell how the woman feels about her. It’s at least neutral, or so Lavellan hopes. “If you want me to speak to my men at the other doors and the perimeter guards now, I will. They will have seen it if someone got out of here.”

“I would appreciate that,” Lavellan says, and proceeds to call down to the kitchen for heated water for tea.

As she allows her Arl Grey tea to steep, Lavellan sits in the viscount’s library to read Solas’s surprisingly lengthy response, written in quick but neat strokes, as if composing the letter excited him:

Inquisitor,

A good Dalish girl? Emma lath, I refuse to believe that you were ever anything of the sort. More seriously, I strongly doubt that you would have become a different person without hearing falsified stories of my past. I would like to think that their appeal depended on something already inherent in you.

There are likely minor truths to whatever you heard, though, if these tales spoke to you so. I apologize once more for utilizing a phrase that you hate, but you have always greatly reminded me of myself as a young man. When I first found myself falling for you, I had feared that the mark had impressed the orb’s aspects of myself onto you and my great enjoyment of your qualities derived from a sort of lonely narcissism. I was admittedly quite glad to learn more of your personal history and discover that you had always been so cocksure and inquisitive, Inquisitor. You also are much louder that I have ever been in my life.

Though I have often thought that our love would have been better fated in a different time, I am somewhat glad that I met you at an older age. As is, you already leave my restraint and judgment in absolute ruin—I shudder to think of how I might have behaved toward you at the height of my youth and immaturity. I would have gone mad with desire for you, vhenan, and we would have very likely torn one another to shreds in our less pleasant passions. I do suppose that such an arrangement would have made for incomprehensibly amazing sex. When I was young, I had a much greater tendency to bite.

To answer your question, though, I was never counted among the Evanuris, though I suppose they begrudgingly considered me to walk on their social strata because of my power, influence, and friendship with Mythal. Despite my familiarity with them, I could hardly stand them. While I would be remiss to not acknowledge my (and your) own prideful nature, I could not bear their specific breed of blind arrogance and the sheer cruel incompetence that many ruled with. Mythal aside, the confidence and poise they held were built on entitlement alone, and in a world where they were not revered as untouchable gods, they would have never maintained power.

But, as you asked, I originally made my name as an analyst of sorts of magics, and often used that skill in the gathering of information. I always had a talent for communing with spirits and reading the undulations of the Fade, and in a world where it integrated itself with the physical, there was much I could derive. Of course those who I sought to look upon on placed wards of varying effectiveness to block the vision of prying eyes, but almost always one could find the reverberations and ripples from each and every action, if one knew where to look and how to interpret the information. The technical aspects of the matter were always much more interesting to me than the ends to which they were applied, admittedly. It was actually in this capacity that I first earned the mantle of Fen’Harel. It was always a hateful moniker, but the full malice attributed to it only came later when I took up arms against the reign of the Evanuris.

Though I had no lands and no supplicants of my own, my social capital amongst the nobles who came to me for information often was enough to tilt the balance between the feuding “gods.” I primarily worked for Mythal, helping her discern truths when she had to levy wise and informed judgments. The other Evanuris (jealous Dirthamen especially, who saw himself as a secret-keeper and hoarded contextless facts with little care for the wisdoms they contained) also used my services when necessary. I suppose that those dealings are how I became skilled in telling half-truths. I was not well-liked, but I was well-known and well-feared and essentially socially ubiquitous in Arlathan and Elvhenan as a whole.

Many things in the society of Arlathan were monstrous and toxic. For instance, full-scale wars over mishaps with pottery. I suppose it is unfair to fully paint the incident with the urn as such, though—when dealing with the Evanuris, conflicts started by such petty personal slights often belied deeper political frustrations. I can assure you that Falon’Din was already quite irate with me over some of my civic posturing when that particular incident arose. I allow myself some hope that when Elvhenan is restored, many of Arlathan’s pitfalls will not arise again, but I suppose that might be for naught. Governance inevitably becomes corrupt and self-serving. Even your Inquisition (which I have voiced my doubts about many times) and Master Tethras’s administration must remain vigilant to delay that unavoidable fate.

I still genuinely wish you could have seen Arlathan. The library you were in may have given some hint as to its nature, but it may be impossible to fully understand for one who was not there. Perhaps you sensed it in the remnants of the structures: a reverberating elegance and a sense of being and belonging lost to time, impossible for you to contextualize and conceptualize.

A sentence is viciously scratched out at the end of the line. Four words, probably Perhaps if you still, are vaguely readable under the scribble of ink, but Lavellan cannot interpret the rest of whatever Solas has chosen to obscure. What a petty and apt metaphor for literally everything, the Inquisitor thinks.

After reneging his words, Solas started a new paragraph:

I suppose that not all of Arlathan was solemn wisdom. Many parts were much like how I understand Kirkwall to be—despondent, discordantly elegiac, yet strangely beautiful in its tenacious hope (except the arson was fueled by magic and the buildings were poorly propped up by haphazard spells instead of rotting wooden staves). I miss both aspects of the city, and both are gone because of me.

I would write more and tell you stories of courtly intrigue that would make Orlais seem a dull and reasonable place, but I am currently quite busy and have already gone on for some time. I have had some issues dealing with the orchestrations of the Qun as of late.

All having been said, you actually know more of Arlathan than you are aware of, as I’ve definitely claimed some of my memories to be vague and indeterminate images shown to me by the Fade. I will think on new tales to recount to you—if I had been honest with you from the beginning, I suppose this would have all come out as pillow talk.

Thank you for asking. Are you still analyzing the codified constitutions of ruling bodies? I hope you’re enjoying your studies.

Solas

Later that evening, the Viscount, the Captain, and the Inquisitor walk the Darktown cisterns. It is wet, and foul winds from the dark cliff-sides penetrate deep into the city’s bowels. No one had been seen exiting the mansion, so the eluvian by which the letters were delivered was most certainly in the city's sprawling network of caves and tunnels.

“Why couldn’t the spy have just climbed out a window to deliver the letter?” Varric groans, walking along with Bianca drawn. His finger is hitched on the trigger, as if he's just waiting for someone to jump out of nowhere and attack. “I really hate being underground. But forget about me, Aveline is the one who shouldn’t be under here, what with her delicate state.”

The Captain narrows her eyes. Threatening shadows are cast under them in the torchlight, and she lets out a long sigh of irritation. “You know, Varric, if something bad were happen to you down here, the guard might never find the time to investigate.”

“Doesn’t being the Viscount count for anything anymore? Save all your stabbing for Chuckles, if we find him,” Varric mumbles, and the small party continues on through the acrid underbelly of the city.

Lavellan has been counting her steps. “We should be under the Viscount’s manor soon, right?” With the short delivery time (especially for such a lengthy letter), the eluvian has to be somewhere almost directly under the manor in the city’s tunnels. The small party hadn’t bothered to search the manor for the entrance that the spy used—they didn’t want to tip off the agent. She was hoping to have more luck searching the depths in Kirkwall than she had the caves of the Frostback Mountains. Lavellan genuinely has no idea where the nearest eluvian to Skyhold is.

Varric nods as he surveys the tunnel. “Seems about right...Oh, I have an idea. How about we play ‘I Spy?’”

Aveline shakes her head. “I would rather not. Let’s just find the magical nonsense and go.”

The dwarf shrugs. “All right, Captain, we won’t have any fun with this, then. But I spy with my little eye a silver glowing light from down that hallway.” The three soon happen upon the eluvian, bright and shining in its dark enclave. “So,” says Varric, “who wants to go through the scary mirror first? I’m really pissed off that this is in my basement, by the way.”

Lavellan pokes at the eluvian with her fake hand, and the seemingly ethereal surface creates a hard barrier that flings her arm backwards. It is locked to her, and she has no idea of the password. She spends a few moments tossing elvish phrases at it before conceding to herself that she won't be able to guess the key.

“My, this mirror is just leaned against the wall. It’s a shame it’s so drafty down here. If someone doesn’t secure this eluvian—“ Lavellan reaches behind the eluvian and gives it a slight tap forward. It falls to the ground and shatters with an unholy clatter and an unpleasant surge of energy, “—it might fall over and break.”

Varric swears that Sundermount had never been so pleasant before as the three sit in the brisk sunlight and break bread atop a blanket. “Seriously,” the dwarf had said earlier as they settled down for their picnic, “This place was crawling with the undead just a few years back. Maybe it’s better because Corypheus isn’t buried around here anymore or something. I don’t know how any of this crap works.”

No one is around for miles, and the party can converse without worry of being overheard. “And that is why the pantheon is both real and absolute bullshit, and why we need your help,” Lavellan says to the Dalish woman she sits across the blanket from.

Merrill blinks as she boils water for the tea on a flame she conjured. “Ara seranna-ma, Inquisitor, but it’s very strange that the Dread Wolf is your ex-boyfriend.”

“Halani-ma…” Lavellan groans. She had always been profoundly unhappy amongst the Dalish, but not because she disliked The People. She finds herself lapsing into elvish with Merrill. She hardly uses the language in her capacity as the Inquisitor. “Sometimes someone in my family or clan or even the Keeper will ask me in a letter why I haven’t mentioned the apostate I used to write to them about. This is exactly why I just tell them that Solas is probably dead somewhere, or something.”

“You seriously went with ‘dead?’” Varric asks with a half-laugh.

“Probably dead somewhere, or something,” Lavellan corrects as Merrill pours her water for tea. “It implies that I don’t really care.” She plops the bag into the water, droplets splashing onto her left glove. She sees the droplets, but feels nothing.

“Well, It’s not much of a story, but works well enough if you want people to drop the subject.”

“Once Isabela was seeing a man who got one of his kidneys stolen. The rest of him disappeared not long after,” Merrill remembers aloud. “You could say that happened.” The dark-haired elf lets out a sigh, and her hand drifts to her cheek, scratching lightly. Other things haunt her mind. “I did so much for the memory of Elvhenan. And my Keeper…” She bites her tongue, choking back a great pain. “No. My intentions went to ruin long ago. But that doesn’t stop it from hurting. Back when he learned, Varric told me a version of what you just said." Lavellan shoots a quick look at the dwarf, who looks down at the blanket. She is surprised by his choice, thinking that Varric would prefer to let Merrill live with a good story than an awful truth. Merrill continues, "It's different hearing it from one of The People. Were you upset when you learned the truth of the Creators?"

“The revelation was very surprising to me,” Lavellan claims, and she is not lying, exactly. Merrill’s vallaslin is more delicate and intricate than Lavellan’s, and the accent that peppers her speech is not quite the same as her own, but they are of the same world, grown from similar roots despite their vast, vast differences. “I understand why you might not want to help us, lethallan.”

Merrill shakes her head, and a strand of dark hair comes loose from behind her ears. “No, lethallan. If you need someone who knows eluvians, then I can help. I broke the one I had, you know. Shattered it, after all that time.

“But I learned so many things while trying to fix it, even if a demon helped teach me. How to change what one is, what one does, where one goes, how to get through… I think I understand it all, in theory. Applying it will be harder, maybe impossible, but if you can get me the amount of lyrium you say you can…well, I won’t have to ask for help again. If I use the things I know to protect the world, perhaps Keeper Marethari will have died for…for something.” Because she is not good at comforting others and does not really know what Merrill is talking about, Lavellan is relieved when the other elf changes her tone. “I wish you and Aveline hadn’t destroyed the one you found under the city.”

“Chuckles was using it to get weird elves—no offense, you two— in and out of my house. My house!” Varric protests to Merrill. “I’m still not happy about that. Besides, if you’d have worked on it while it was active, he might have popped through and caught you or something.”

Lavellan clears her throat. “And you can do the work without being noticed?” she asks. Until Inquisition agents found Morrigan once more, Merrill is best person to research the eluvian network and how to interfere with it, even with the obvious risk her past posed.

“You’re really asking if Daisy can be sneaky?” Varric asked. “Do you know how much blood magic she used right under the noses of the Kirkwall templars? Do you know how many elves she got past Tevinter slavers after the city fell?”

“Blood magic can’t be quantified, Varric,” Merrill says quizzically. “But oh! Yes. I’ve done things very quiet before. Once I even killed a rat without my neighbors hearing me chase it.”

Well, Varric’s testimony is good enough for Lavellan. She extends her good hand to the other elf. “Andaran-atishan, Merrill. Welcome to the Inquisition.”

Lavellan visits her own estate in Kirkwall at the end of her stay. It’s a lovely building and has a bright, open foyer with marble floors. It is a space that deserves to be lived in by someone, and Lavellan isn’t used to the concept of a home. Skyhold was that, maybe. She makes a mental note to tell Varric to lease it out to someone. Lavellan, resolute in her determination to be absolutely inappropriate, leaves a letter folded into her travel itinerary:

Solas,

I’m glad we’re getting to know one another better. It’s almost like what we were supposed to be doing in the year and a half that we were together! I can tell how much you miss coming into sexual contact with me. Though you should probably keep your shiny golden pants on for the time being, you're beginning to make me blush. I’m supposed to be the obscene one and you’re supposed to be the mature gentleman, remember?

But by all means, continue sweet-talking me through the mail. Maybe enclose a portrait miniature of yourself or something. You paint, right? Can you do provocative watercolors?

I have indeed been studying still—I’m thinking about drafting something for the Inquisition using Kirkwall’s charter as a guide on how not to enumerate purposes. It’s so internally inconsistent. Speaking of Kirkwall, the city’s been treating me very well. I have yet to be mugged! While I am still in the Marches I’m headed to Wycome to see my clan. But you know that, because whoever delivered this letter broke in to my house to go through my travel itinerary. I might have to start sleeping on top of important documents.

You know, I used to write to my clan about you. I can’t really do that anymore. It’s a shame. I think the Keeper would have liked you. I haven’t much to say now, but most things are going quite pleasantly and I am in high spirits. Despite the more practical part of myself, I really do hope you’re taking care of yourself.

Dareth-shiral,

Inquisitor Lavellan

In the late afternoon, Lavellan walks down one of Kirkwall’s streets alone to say goodbye to the walled city. The battered but resilient denizens of Kirkwall have shaped Thedas’s fate before, and perhaps they shall again.

As Lavellan ruminates, a masked man with a peck-knife jumps from the shadows. “Listen up, elf. Hand over your coin purse without a fuss, and you won’t get hurt.”

The Inquisitor groans loudly. “Really? Just…really?”

Chapter Text

Lavellan lounges in the shadow of the aravel, whispering into the transistor crystal. “So you’re sure the issue with Nevarra is defused?”

The gem lights up with Dorian’s voice, distorted ever so slightly by the magic transition. “For the most part. You just have to get the Magisterium started on the subject of ‘Seheron Relief Efforts’ and they’ll all rush away from whatever they’re talking about to prove how patriotic they are. They’re like lemmings. Malicious little lemmings. So tell me, how is your clan? Is the Dalish experience as quaint and rustic as I imagine it to be?”

“Dorian, my clan lives in Wycome now. That’s a city.” The quaintness and rusticity, however, have not been fully lost. Clan Lavellan certainly made their new property, a sprawling estate appropriated from the Venatori, their own. Landships litter the lawn, and halla happily wander about the expanse of green.

“Ah, yes. Wycome. I suppose that would count as a city to someone who quite literally was raised in the woods,” the magister laughs, but not cruelly. “While we’re talking about our wicked machinations, though, Dagna and I managed to erect a connection with another set of crystals remotely. We should be able to talk about the project in peace, if her end remains secure. I can’t believe you’re having so many problems with spies. You really should have run Solas through the last time you saw him. It would’ve made things much easier.”

“He can kill people by looking at them now, Dorian.”

“Well, yes, but Solas wouldn’t kill you.” Dorian pauses. “Fine, so he might kill you. But he would probably feel quite bad about it. And I would never let him live it down. I could start writing to him like you do, only to tell him how terribly he dresses. Are you absolutely certain that he was wearing gold pants the last time you saw him?”

“I’m also stuck on this point.” 

“While I encourage his move away from the ‘apostate hobo’ look, I’m afraid that he may be overcompensating now.”

Though her friend can’t see her, Lavellan grins. “How’s your long distance relationship been?”

Dorian sighs, half irritably and half wistfully. “Bull keeps joking about sneaking into Minrathous to see me. I’m afraid that he might be serious about trying, in some measure. I don’t care if that huge lummox was a spy, he’ll get us both killed in the commotion he causes.”

“So, it’s going better than mine,” responds Lavellan. Dorian had chastised her harshly when she had told him about the letters, but tentatively agreed to trust her judgment, or complete lack thereof.

There is a small gust of wind, and an envelope descends from a tree which’s branches arch over the estate perimeter. The silhouette of a petite person in a cloak can be seen behind the boughs, and the branches ripple as they rush through the trees. “I have to go, Dorian,” Lavellan says abruptly, and she shoves the crystal back into her lapel. Chasing the shadow of the deliverer, Lavellan flings herself at the wall but cannot climb it with one hand.

Groaning a half-hearted “fuck you, Solas,” Lavellan chases the blowing letter across the lawn in the breeze and eventually has to pry it from the mouth of a halla. 

Inquisitor,

One of my eluvians in Kirkwall fell over and shattered while you were there. What a strange coincidence.

I doubt that your plan to lie on your papers would protect your secrets from my agents. I am unsure as to whether or not you know this of yourself, but you shift in your sleep far too often for your idea to be workable. You would find it entirely impossible to stay atop them. There were very many evenings during which I was drawn from the Fade repeatedly by your motions. You roll over often, and your elbows are uncommonly sharp.

Pray tell, how are the Dalish? I apologize that you can no longer speak to your clan about me. I can’t say I’m not curious about what you’ve told them in the past. I suppose it is too much to hope for good things—I would not deserve that.

I have thought much about your people as of late. I do not have many of their number in my service, but they are present. Almost all of them carry great pain from the truths I have revealed to them. Many asked to have their vallaslin removed, and I could only respect their wishes. As is, those who I have treated cannot work as agents within the clans or masquerade as their former selves any longer. They are a uniquely lonesome constituency, or so I can assume from the brief interactions that I have had with them.

I try not to speak with my agents more than I must. I allowed myself to make friends in your Inquisition, and I shall not repeat that mistake and mire myself in guilt over the sacrifices that my agents must make in my name, or over eliminating them myself if necessary. Despite my attempted distance, I may have an anecdote regarding those who work for me that you might find either amusing or mortifying.

I review all of the information that my people collect, as gathering information is my primary motive for seeding them throughout Thedas. Naturally, the spy who carries me the material will also read what they pick up so they know what exactly they are delivering and its import. Fairly recently, several of my agents asked to meet with me regarding matters of espionage. Specifically my interests within the Inquisition.

I do have one or two people strictly tasked with delivering mail to and from you. However, some of my spies who are not so specifically assigned will on occasion find some piece of literature that you intended for me. A handful of these agents have asked for permission to pass your affects off to me without opening them.  

One of them told me he felt like a voyeur. Of course, I was called to remind him that he is, in fact, a spy, and that voyeurism constitutes the entirety of his job. In response, the man was compelled to inform me that he did not need to know your opinions on the hue of my body hair. I found myself unable to rebut that point. A few others voiced surprise that we were “still together,” and their opinions on the matter, which I will not recount here.

I was much more embarrassed by the whole thing than I could possibly let them know, but I thought that you should be aware that you’ve successfully scandalized many of my agents. Congratulations.

Solas

Lavellan set the letter down when she was finished reading. She wants to laugh about the matter, or feel vaguely uncomfortable that random men and women knew of her (joking) sexual proclivities, but her mind will not focus there. Lavellan sets the letter down, and runs her right hand along her tattooed cheekbone. She almost feels the lines burning into her still-marked (still-marred, she knows he would say, and she hates it) face. He removed their vallaslin. Had there ever been true intimacy to his offer to her? Of course not. That wasn’t what it was about. She understands, yet is bothered still. 

Lavellan curses her own irrationality, scrawls a note that asks “Which eluvian was that?” and acts accordingly based on the information provided. She leaves her newest envelope in a stranger’s mailbox on the way out to the Wycome marketplace. 

 Keeper Deshanna is busy resolving a city zoning conflict, and Lavellan spends the day walking Wycome’s open-air market with her cousin, the clan’s First. There are bright canopies about the square, and the sky is a brilliant blue. 

“It’s all still so new,” Hellathen Lavellan says as she peers at the blown-glass bobbles in an artisan’s stall. “The city, I mean. I don’t understand how you do it, Adahlen! This scares me. Every day is more different from our old life than the last.”

Lavellan shrugs, jostling an old tome on the philosophical underpinnings of historical Chantry heresies between her real hand and her false one. She had picked it up amongst a used bookseller’s wares—she figures she should deepen her knowledge on Andrasteism now that she worked for the Chantry itself. Plus, she is getting sick of charters. “I’ve always been adaptable.” If anyone knows that the Inquisitor walks among them, they do not reveal it. Lavellan is dressed down and blends in amongst the other Dalish elves that roam the city’s market district.

Around the cobblestone square, elves she does not recognize as being from Clan Lavellan walk the streets, hawking their handiworks—Deshanna’s appointment to the city council has made Wycome safe place for the Dalish of the Marches to trade. “Not to mention grossly ambitious. I hate to say this, but I think I would have been miserable with the clan if I had never left.” The Inquisitor had deeply resented her cousin’s role in her youth. She had wished she could lead the clan. Lavellan supposed that it all worked out.            

“I don’t know. You would’ve been named Warleader eventually,” Lavellan’s cousin offers. Hellathen, blissfully happy in her role, had always been bothered by her cousin’s discontent. The woman was good-hearted, but could never quite understand unshakeable sadness with no tangible cause. Still, she would be the first to offer sympathy. Lavellan knows Hellathen will make a good Keeper one day.

“I don’t think I could have protected the clan from the Venatori here as Warleader.” It was all about efficacy.

“I want to help the clan as a leader. And I should. I’m First, but...Some of these people look at me and are afraid. They look at Deshanna and are afraid. We’re apostates to them still,” Hellathen says. “If it wasn’t for the Inquisition…“ she trails off, nervous and afraid.

“The Inquisition has minimal presence in Wycome now,” Lavellan assures her cousin. “If the humans wanted you gone—“

“They’d have to lose the trade agreements with Kirkwall to be rid of us,” says Hellathen as the two walk along. “I know you’re trying to make me feel better, but I'm aware of the fact that the Viscount of Kirkwall is doing you a favor by helping us. What does an urban Keeper even do? Everything is different now. Some of the craftsmen are considered tradespeople now, you know, and we sell meat and fish in the markets. A few have moved from the estate to city apartments, and that scares the rest.”

“That’s quite the shift. I can see why people are concerned.”

Hellathen nods. “Deshanna is always calming fights. She doesn’t want the city elves and humans to know that we are having trouble. I keep asking the Creators for guidance, but I don’t think they walk here. What does June say about economics? What is a pack of hunters dedicated to Andruil among this crowd? Can Sylaise bless a tenement hall? Does Mythal have feelings about civil litigation? How would Falon’Din deal with an anonymous body left in an alleyway?” Hellathen’s facial expression hardens slightly, and a pang wells in Lavellan’s chest.

“I wouldn’t know,” Lavellan says, though she wants to say that for the most part, they wouldn’t have particularly cared. But Hellathen draws strength and ideological grounding from the concepts of noble and loving rulers, and Lavellan won't disrespect that. “When the Dalish Kingdom fell, I assume the worship of the Creators changed then, too.”

“And we were likely worse for it, more lost!” Hellathen shakes her head. “You sound so disaffected. Perhaps I shouldn’t ask this of one who doesn’t believe.” 

“Probably not,” Lavellan shrugs. “Sorry if I made anything worse. It’s just…you know I’m here to help. Whatever you need.”

Hellathen is quiet for a moment, staring down at her reflection in a shiny basin in a display. “I don’t remember Aunt Elainis well, but I think she would’ve been proud of you.” Lavellan remembers the sting of her fresh vallaslin at sixteen, and all the voices that had clamored to sing similar sentiments then.

Lavellan makes herself smile, but it turns to a half-hearted grin. She did not think of her deceased mother much, nor did she want to. Lavellan figured she should thank her cousin, as the woman meant well. “I appreciate that, lethallan.” 

“What you do is important, to the Dalish and to the world. I…I know you don’t believe in the Creators, but I ask to them to guide you and protect you every day.” Hellathen bows her head. “Lasa ghilan, Elgar’nan, Mythal enansal.” Lavellan had not told any of her clan the truth of the Enuvaris. How could she? Solas would probably disapprove of hiding the reality in such a way, Lavellan couldn’t help but think. Not that she cared what he thought, especially in regards to veracity. Yet even Varric, typically a proud liar, had told Merrill. But Varric could never understand how deep the belief went with the Dalish. He knew not what he shattered. Hellathen continues, “I pray that you walk out of the sight of the Dread Wolf—ah!”

A hooded figure smaller than either of the women knocks into them both, and Lavellan feels a hand at her pocket. “Sorry, ma’am!” comes the voice of a young man, and he hurries off into the crowd. 

“Ir abelas!” Hellathen cries after him, but soon jumps in realization. “Oh, no, did he try to—“

 “Fleece me? Yes,” Lavellan lies almost automatically. The boy had handed her an envelope, which she furtively slips between the pages of the book, a difficult task to manage with only one hand. “He didn’t get anything, though. Come on, let’s get back to the estate. The Keeper should be done drawing up district lines by now, right?”

Lavellan has time to withdraw to her quarters to review the short letter. The salutation is at least half-sardonic, but it brings a small smile to her lips: 

Vhenan,

‘Which eluvian’ indeed.  

I should have known you would send me an envelope full of flour once I told you your mail would come to me still sealed.

I shall leave you with both the satisfaction of knowing that the flour did indeed get all over me, and the disappointment of knowing that each and every grain was removed fairly easily with the help of magic.

Solas

A grinning Lavellan starts a response, but does not have time to write anything more than a sentence before the Keeper knocks at the door of her chambers.

Deshanna and Lavellan walk outside the perimeter of the estate late in the evening. The sky turns a gentle purple overhead in the low dusk. 

“I saw you sparring with Nithas and Kelleth. You’re going to hurt yourself that way, da’len,” says the Keeper. “It might be wise of you to accept that your days as a combatant are over. There are other things in the world that require your time.”

“I can always make time. That’s why there’s tea,” Lavellan counters. Sleep is not a reprieve, unwanted by the Inquisitor for several reasons. “I don’t just give up at things, hahren. Accepting defeat—“

“—is sometimes the best option,” Deshanna finishes. Her chestnut-colored hair is greying and the blue lines of her vallaslin only serve to accentuate the tired creases that have formed in her skin. “Sometimes it is best to save energy for other fights. You have seemed distant since your arrival, and for some time in your letters. I know that there is something that you’re not telling me.”

Lavellan gives a guilty smile, and shakes her head as she swallows the expression. “It’s complicated.” How would she tell Deshanna that the world could be ending again? There wasn’t even a self-evident hole in the sky to explain the threat for her this time, and the whole story could be earthshattering. Deshanna was not particularly conservative, but she was devout. “Let’s just say I have a new nemesis, and I can’t fight them conventionally.”

“You know you can trust me with the details if you need to talk, da’len. I’m nowhere near the oldest Keeper you’ll meet, but I’ve walked the world far longer than you and wandered roads that you have not thought to tread.”

“I’m not even sure of all the details myself,” Lavellan grimaces. She never used to mind not knowing all of the information—she was good at guessing, deducing things from pieces and clues. Now her blindness frustrates her to the point of near paralysis. Knowledge is power, and she is short on knowledge. A stream runs along the opposite side of the path that the Keeper and the Inquisitor amble along, and the air is quiet aside from the water’s burbling. “I’ll work through it and come out on top. I promise.”

Deshanna looks up to the sky as she walks. “That is good to hear. I always feared that you had your mother’s sickness—you were always so unhappy. Even if it is away from Clan Lavellan, I am glad that you have found a place. I’ve prayed for guidance for you from Ghilan’nian since your childhood, and how she has lead you!” 

Lavellan had forgotten everyone in her clan’s insistence on speaking of her mother. It’s weird and she doesn’t like it. And again with the praying! Lavellan supposes that she can’t say she doesn’t appreciate the sentiment. Finally, Lavellan speaks again to change the subject. “How are they all? Hellathen says that adjusting to Wycome has been difficult.”

Deshanna takes a while to answer. “Overall, it has been going well. We’ve gotten along with the city elves, and after all that happened during the war, the humans here have been willing to rebuild the city to accommodate our presence. This is hardly the life we were raised to live. I think if there were not a forest nearby to hunt in and a market for our goods, some would go mad from the difference in lifestyle. Many in the clan believe we are betraying the Old Ways, and their worship grows stronger.”

“Fuck the Old Ways.”

Deshanna reaches sideways to give the Inquisitor a slap on the shoulder. The Keeper had essentially raised her, and had not lost her maternal bent. “Language, da’len! Must you always be vulgar? Your lack of faith is uncommon amongst your People, or have you forgotten that of us in your time amongst the shemlen?

“Belief in the Creators and the Old Ways make the Dalish who they are. I am not a traditionalist by Dalish standards. I would not have been so successful in my work in Wycome if I was. Many at the Arlathvens have chastised me in the past for my willingness to have Clan Lavellan interact with humans. I have always insisted that we must accept reality to thrive and prosper so we can be secure in our remembrance, but it has come to the point where our prosperity and good fortune has changed everything we thought we knew of the world, including our place in it. Clan Lavellan is currently situated unlike any Dalish clan has ever been—The Old Ways and the Creators keep us what we are, keep us together in a world that would wish for us to vanish.”

“Sorry, I spoke unthinkingly,” Lavellan says. “It was stupid of me to say.” She wonders if the Dalish would change with power and political acumen. She herself, a very influential woman on the continental stage, is Dalish for all to see, blood writing clear on her face. But she’s just one individual. Lavellan places her good hand in her pocket, and looks up at the sky. Words come to her unbidden: “I had a friend who didn’t get that about the Dalish. He claimed he understood, but I think that in the end he couldn’t see past his own feelings on the matter.”

“Your apostate.” It’s not a question.

Lavellan laughs. “Solas was hardly mine.” 

“From your words, he seemed to give you some peace,” Deshanna says. “From other things you said, though, I take it that it didn’t end well.”

“Or that he didn’t end well. I told you that he died, hahren. Remember when I told you that he died?”

Deshanna raises a brow as she stops to look out over the river. Bugs buzz amidst the reeds and quiet eddies bubble over the steady undercurrent. “For the sake of your career in politics, I hope that you’re better at lying to shem nobles than you are at lying to me. When I came to get you from your quarters, I saw on your desk that you were writing a letter to the man.”

Lavellan mentally curses her handwriting. She can’t seem to get it to turn out as fine with her right hand as she had with her left. “No, it didn’t end well,” Lavellan concedes. “And I’m not sure if it actually ended at all.” Or if it would ever end, she thinks, but ushers the thoughts from her mind when she remembers that death itself had a good probability of eventually coming between her and Solas. Lavellan searches for better subject matter when a small statue catches her attention. “You put one of these out here.”

Deshanna tilts her head to observe the stonework carving of Fen’Harel in the low light of the still settling dusk. The workmanship is intricate, but time has eroded some of the finer detailing on the totem. A patinated copper bowl is attached to a small pedestal at the Dread Wolf’s feet, and it is filled sparsely with coins and trinkets. “You always used to like Fen’Harel’s myths so much, being the odd child you were. Considering what we just spoke of, is its placement at all strange to you?”

“Not at all,” Lavellan admits, and she peers over her shoulder at the walls of the estate Deshanna and Clan Lavellan hold. She smiles, something genuine bubbling through her exhaustion. “I suppose this place is the camp now. So, weird question, but is it me or are half the women of the clan pregnant? Is there something in the water in Wycome?”

Deshanna lets out an irritated groan. “Do not get me started with that, da’len. Do not."

Lavellan returns to her quarters later and prepares for bed. She undresses, detaches her prosthesis and pulls a loose shift over her head. All of her nightwear either has short sleeves or is bereft of them. Lavellan does not know whether or not she dislikes empty flapping shirt arms or the weight of folded and pinned fabric more. She sees out the window that some of her clan is making a bonfire on the lawn. She promises herself that she’ll join them there the next night. Now, she does not have the energy.

She instead sits at her desk to finish the letter that she had already began writing:

Solas,

I really, really can’t help myself sometimes. Tel’abelas. Seriously, though, I have no idea what eluvian you’re talking about.

I can’t speak for the Dalish as a whole, but my clan is doing very well. Wycome has been good to them—some fear it has been too good. As I’m sure you’ll be absolutely thrilled to hear, adherence to the Old Ways has been galvanized by the change. They’re afraid of losing what they are. Deshanna says the Old Ways are what make the Dalish what they are, but I’m not certain that’s all that makes the Dalish the Dalish. Being dispossessed is quite a bit of it. I am uncertain as to whether power will change us.

I wonder if Briala thinks about this sort of thing in regards to her work. How access to political power will transform elves in general, that is.

Groups and individuals aren’t the same, but I think about it a lot in regards to myself. I wouldn’t have been what I was early in life if I could have been literally anything else. I’m different now because I have different possibilities. There will be more ways to be an elf in the coming years, so what being an elf means will transform and then being an elf will transform, if that makes sense.

  I think this would be easier to parse in person. I’d say drinks, but apparently you don’t do that. High tea, then. Milk? Water? Strange effervescent nectar lost to the ages that only the most ancient and mighty of the Elvhen drank? Honestly, you should just come to tea with me for the cakes.

I suppose I’ll wait to see what happens, though. Not knowing is exciting and scary at once. Maybe the improvements won't be permanent, or things could backfire, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

I’ve been speaking on behalf of elves being promoted more quickly in the Chantry now that Leliana allows us access to priesthood, the cooperative government of Wycome is running smoothly, and I like to believe that service in the Inquisition has garnered respect for those elves who have returned home from their posts. Other Dalish clans have been seeing better relations with humans, too, or so I’ve been told. Things are changing for the better, but of course there is more work to be done. I doubt integration into current structures of political power would be a complete disappearance of everything we are. We’d keep the religion, at least.

A lot of the religion is all right, if you ignore the fact that it springs from false gods who, by your account, were shitty people. Still, even if the Dalish religion is meaningless, I’ll argue that a worthwhile if not myopic way of life and code of ethics have formed around it. (For instance, Vir Tanadhal has less to do with Andruil than it does with mindfully interacting with your environment, I would argue.) Fight me on it, Solas.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t believe in the Maker, either, but if He and His Bride inspire people like Leliana, Cullen, and Cassandra, then I can’t discount the value of the Chant. (Or maybe I’m contractually obligated to say this because I work for the Chantry. Even you will never know the terms of my employment.) It’s the same sort of thing.  

Anyways, regardless of what else happens to the elves, I’m sure there will be a lot of them. I think Thedas in general is having a baby boom, and my Keeper is beside herself with the amount of births the clan is expecting, especially because she has to perform midwifery duties. Deshanna swears everyone got happy and frisky because the world didn’t end and they suddenly had a bunch of new city elves (and humans, I’m certain there will be plenty of elf-blooded kids) to start messing around with. She thinks less than half are suited to be parents at the time and wishes that everyone was paying more attention to contraception. At least everyone is hopeful for the future.

I think that my personal story could greatly inspire the Dalish to consider abstinent lifestyles. A proverb might go: “Don’t have sex outside of the ties of bonding, or the person you’re doing it with could turn out to be the Dread Wolf in disguise, then one thing will lead to another and eventually you’ll have to downsize your private army.” I think it’s very relatable.  

I’m going to go spend time with my clan now. I told myself I’d just go to bed earlier in the evening, but I don’t get to see them often. Some of them are having a bonfire on the lawn and I keep hearing them laugh.  

As always, I hope you’re not entirely miserable,

Inquisitor Lavellan

Later in the evening, Lavellan returns to her room tired and smelling of smoke. She is happy that she went to see her clan, and it had served to make her feel much better. They’ve always been good people, funny people. She begins to remove her jacket from over her shift. She had left the letter on her desk, assuming someone would pick it up, but her own envelope lay unmoved. No one within the estate, she realizes, spies for Fen’Harel. It is strangely relieving.

Lavellan shifts her jacket back up onto her shoulders and gathers the envelope up. She exits the estate and slips past the aravels on the lawn, under which the halla blissfully curl up to sleep, and around which groups of elves still loitering under the stars. She’s barefoot and her soles hurt as she ambles down the gravel road that lines the side of the property. How long has it been since she began regularly wearing boots, she wonders? Sometime in Haven, probably. It’s a very un-Dalish thing to do. 

Finally, Lavellan comes to the wolf totem that she had found earlier with Deshanna. She kneels and slips the letter into the copper bowl. It’s the first time in her life that she’s left anything to any of the Creators of her own volition.

 The next day, Lavellan sits on the lawn in a circle amidst some of those she used to hunt with, a bottle of wine in her real hand. “I’ll fight you again, Kelleth, I swear. And this time, I'll win.”

 The other elf laughs as Lavellan tilts the bottle of wine into her mouth. “Do you like having your ass kicked or something?”

Lavellan glowers at him half-jokingly. Until she lost her hand, Kelleth had never been as good as a warrior or hunter as her, and he’d never quite liked her partially from resentment and partially from personal distaste. Still, they had a long personal history, and even earned their vallaslin together. Lavellan remembers the incident well—the teenaged elves could have returned with any quarry to prove their worth as hunters, but she’d convinced him to try and kill a bear with her. It was a decision that had nearly cost the two of them their lives, but she was certain that it was one of Kelleth’s fonder memories of her. “I’ll have you know that I’ve slain dragons. At least ten of them.”

 “That means I’m tougher than at least ten dragons,” Kelleth answers with a sharp grin. Though he is a hunter, he has the vallaslin representative of June tattooed on his face to honor his craftsman father. “Hey, Adahlen. Whatever happened to your hand, anyways? Didn’t it have some sort of magical power?”

She looks down at her left arm. She is not wearing her prosthesis and the emptiness of the area beyond her elbow seems unnatural. “Eh, yes, I guess it did.” Lavellan misses the ability to tear holes in reality, but not nearly as much as she misses being able to open doors while holding things. She decides to tell most of the truth: “It became unstable and a mage had to remove it.” Lavellan is getting good at that sort of thing, and remembers Solas telling her of practicing his half-lies amongst the gods of Arlathan.

“That’s not very fun,” Kelleth sighs disappointedly. 

Lavellan scoffs, but not without a tinge of good nature. “What did you expect me to say, that it was eaten by one of the dragons?”

The other warrior shrugs. “Yes, something like that. Or maybe that Fen’Harel lopped it off in a duel.” Lavellan nearly chokes on her drink.

“That’s ridiculous, Kelleth,” she says, trying to play off her sputter as if it is nothing.

Kelleth snatches the bottle from her and upends it into his own mouth. “What?” he asks when he is done with his swig. “If you’re going to make a habit of fighting evil gods, you might as well go one-on-one with one of ours.”

“Sorry to disappoint. It was just magic.” 

Another elf sitting nearby pipes in. Nithas is a few years younger than Lavellan and has grown quite a bit since she left for the Conclave. “Fenedhis, of course it was magic. It’s always magic, like with those cursed ruins and all the fire that once. How does Hellathen manage? At least she’s a careful person. I would be more worried for anyone else.”

“Just admit you have eyes for the girl, Nithas!” an older hunter shoots, and the young man cows at the accusation, mumbling a mild swear of embarrassment in elvish. The whole group clamors happily as they tease the young man, and for a while, Lavellan almost feels like she belongs there.

“You know,” Kelleth interrupts the silence, “I’m going to be Warleader. Revassan is stepping down soon—says he’s too old to fight. He’s told me I’m his successor.”

“Congratulations,” Lavellan says with a smile, but Kelleth shakes his head.

Kelleth takes a drink, and his voice drops as it cools. “I always wanted to be Warleader. Mostly for myself, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t want to have the satisfaction of beating you out for the part. Always thought I would wipe the smug smile off your fucking face when I gave you the news. But you weren’t even in the running because you aren’t here anymore. And we don’t even need a Warleader, what with this city. I should be happy. I am happy, but—“ 

“Hello? Hello? Is the Inquisitor in there?” someone yells from the gate. There is a human courier there with a bag of mail. “The town hall got a bunch of birds from Orlais in for you. Says it’s all official and has to be delivered to her hands…hand? I hear she’s got just one...only.” He peers at the gathering of elves in the yard, but there is no malice in his gaze. It is strange for Lavellan to be amongst the Dalish and not feel despised by humans. She rather likes the change.

“I’m the Inquisitor,” Lavellan says, standing to jog across the lawn to the front gate. Alcohol has added just a tinge of looseness to her quick gait.

“Can you prove you’re the Inquisitor? I don’t mean to be giving this to just any elf claiming to be her,” the messenger asks through the wrought metal bars, and the look shot at him by the one-armed woman is enough. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. Your Worship, I mean…”

Lavellan sighs. “Thank you for your vigilance, I suppose. What’ve we got?”

“Let’s see, Lady Lavellan. Most are from Val Royeaux and Skyhold, but we have a couple from Denerim, one from Cumberland…and then…ah, it doesn’t say who it’s from, but this one’s for you, too. Don’t remember packing it up though…”

“I’ll take them from here,” offers Lavellan, and she awkwardly attempts to hold the massive confluence of letters the man passes through the slats in one hand. When she returns to the circle, everyone’s looking at her again. 

“Lethallan! Are you going to go read the letters from the shem lords?” Nithas asks.

“Of course she is,” Kelleth answers. “It’s her job.” It feels like there is some disdain in his voice, but Lavellan doesn’t care. Josephine seems to have sent something about the still-denaturing conflict between Nevarra and Tevinter, at least a dozen Orlesian nobles have written, as well as some advisor from Denerim called Eamon, and also a new Seeker writing on behalf of the ever-busy Cassandra. She doesn’t really have to guess who sent her the letter without the return address.

“It is my job. I’ll come back later, yes?” Lavellan leaves the group to walk inside and up to the guest chambers of the estate.

She deals with all of her other work before opening the letter from Solas. The sky is beginning to darken when she finally rips the seal and peers inside. Lavellan immediately rolls her eyes at him:

Inquisitor,  

I disagree strongly with many of the sentiments you laid forth in your preceding letter. How you twist the inherently fallacious system of the Dalish religion does not serve to negate the lies it is founded on but instead only obfuscates them and allows them to fester unchecked and uncorrected.

Stop rolling your eyes. I know you’re doing so, Inquisitor.  

Perhaps you would feel somewhat differently if you had been amongst the faithful when your eyes were opened to the falsehood of the Evanuris. You have always found it necessary to rationalize others’ faiths, but the true lies you now excuse are far more deleterious than any you have forgiven in the past. I will say that I fully understand the process of your thoughts and do not find them irrational. They arise from an unfortunately limited perspective.

As for the power of elves in this world, I fear your reforms will not hold as you intend them. Your own good fortune is an oddity. This world and its hierarchy were not made for our people, and our people were not made for this world. Yet, while it lasts, I would prefer to see your endeavors come to fruition. Helping any disadvantaged group is a worthy use of power. I still shall warn you, however, to be careful to not allow your means to become your ends. Such is how many well-meaning rulers turn to grasping decadence and directionless depravity.

But enough of this. I have no doubt in my mind that we can argue until the world is bereft of ink on our account and every forest is felled to provide us with paper.  

Solas

  P.S. I would consider your proposed proverb about the dangers of accidentally making love to mythological villains to be a direct attack upon my sex life if I had one.

I fear that the situation you warn against is rather singular: you have been the only pretty elven woman that I have seduced in this millennium. Even that statement paints the situation inaccurately. It does not excuse any of my actions toward you, but you most definitely came on to me first.

It has come to my notice that you have been very consistently vulgar in your letters to me—while you have always been forward, I don’t recall you being so verbally explicit in person. This has led me to believe that there is something wrong.

Lavellan wants to write back to tell him to stop asking dumb questions for dumb reasons, but the last vestiges of light are draining from the sky. The hunters still sit on the lawn as they would in a meadow or forest clearing. She can respond in the morning, and she only has a few days left with her clan.

Lavellan stumbles back to her room late in the evening very drunk but very much awake. The room is lit bright with oil lamps but she does not bother to turn them off.

The Inquisitor collapses on her bed face first, feeling the impression of the wolf’s bone necklace on her chest as she presses it between her body and the sheets. The letter. She had almost forgotten. Lavellan considers pouring herself a glass of water, but instead opts to carry the entirety of the dangerously sloshing pitcher to her desk with her.

Lavellan’s intoxication does her writing no favors: 

Solas,

Your perspective is limited too. That’s the thing about perspectives. They’re limited.  

But you asked not to argue so I won’t any further

If you can’t tell from the state of my handwriting I am quite drunk right now. Wish you were here even if you’re the absolute worst.

I guess that’s what’s wrong. Why I keep cracking really inappropriate jokes that is. It’s so much easier to tell you that you have the best thighs and ass I’ve ever seen on a male elf than it is to broach the subject of how much I miss intimacy with you.

And not just sex. Not that I don’t miss sex. Sex with you, I mean. But it’s more than that. I think about the smallest things all the time. Silly things like asking you to read aloud and listening to your voice and you playing with my hair and me telling you about things I’d learned and having you smile or helping each other take off our armor in camp and touching where the straps left marks and even especially holding hands and not caring that it was in front of everyone.

The Keeper asked me about you, she said it seemed like you’d brought me peace. I hate that she’s right

I said it before, but this is hard, it’s so hard. You made me feel like nothing was too big to handle. You bridged my gaps in confidence, because how could anything be unmanageable when you seemed to understand it all?? I could use a little of that certainty on my side right now even if my source of certainty could get really grim and make things scarier sometimes. But even when things were the most terrifying you were almost always calm despite fully knowing the worst that could happen. I could stare in to the abyss with you at my side and feel brave.  

I don’t know what’s happening right now. I don’t know what you’re doing, how bad it’s going to be if I fail, what courses of action I can even take. And I can’t ask you, because you’re the fucking problem.

I just have to keep hoping that I’ll come out on top when the dust clears.

And you know, you were the first person to have ever called me beautiful. It shouldn’t matter but it does.

Not at all soberly,

Adahlen 

Lavellan signs the letter. Still wavering slightly, she takes a drink from the pitcher and slips the paper into an envelope. She drags herself down the stairs and out into the lawn. Some of the hunters are still there—Kelleth included. His arm is wrapped around some handsome city elf as they lean against an aravel together. He waves loosely at Lavellan, illuminated only slightly by the dying embers of a nearby bonfire. She reciprocates the gesture with the stump of her left arm. 

Lavellan places the envelope in the mailbox at the gate of the estate, and heads back to her room to pass into a deadened sleep.

Lavellan thanks every benevolent force in the universe from Andraste to various Avaar gods that she drank a whole pitcher of water the previous night, because she wakes up early with a clear head. Immediately, she rushes down to the mailbox—she needs to take the damned letter out. Lavellan isn’t fully certain of what she wrote, but she thinks she signed it with her given name, and she knows that she likely had said too much. Solas is an enemy. He should not see her weakness.

She runs across the lawn barefoot to the mailbox, and opens it. There is a new envelope there, unmarked as always. She turns to a groggy and groaning Kelleth, who seems to have slept outside. “Lethallin! Did you see anyone go into the mail?”

Kelleth grimaces in the rising sun. “What…? Why…” He looks around. “Brydin’s gone?”

“The city elf you were with?” Lavellan asks. Both the man and the envelope had vanished. Lavellan vaguely wonders if it was anything more than a coincidence. “Are you two…?”

“Together? Sure. You could say that. What’s it to you, Adahlen?” His tone is combative and proud at once.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Kelleth,” she teases, turning to go back into the estate.

There is no tea in the disused kitchen, so Lavellan finds her way into a sunroom to read the response to the letter she should have never sent. An uncomfortable terror pools in her stomach as she carefully peels open the envelope, a difficult task that she has gotten rather skilled at: 

Inquisitor,

Lavellan is glad that he doesn't use her name.

I at first thought that it might be best to not respond to your letter. The intoxication with which you wrote was noted—casualties of your evening included not only your handwriting but your punctuation and composition. I was unsure of as to whether or not you wished for me to read your words.  

(There is, I suppose, a hint of irony to the last statement, as I am informed of the contents of your other mail against your will.)

Yet I am compelled to reply to you. You said that I was your certainty, a source of strength in knowing and direction, a companion in conceptualizing and conquering. I am flattered that you saw me as such.

I must admit that I consider you similarly, or rather that I saw you and see you still in the exact opposite light. You are uncertainty incarnate, the anathema to the worst bouts of fatalism borne from knowing too much and believing I know too well.

I have told you how I felt the whole world change when I held your hand to close the rift near the Temple of Sacred Ashes. Even before I knew you as you, you represented tenuous hope and hopeful tenacity—in the face of a burning world, you were willing to stand despite the futility of doing so. In the depths of darkness you were consistently unwilling to resign yourself to failure, to throw yourself at last chances and grasp at slivers of light. Scared though you are, you do much the same against me now. It does not matter to me that your optimism belies arrogance. It is still an impressive attitude for one who fights her battles uphill.

Despair is useless, you’ve told me. And what is despair but the ultimate certainty of destruction? Even now you are a strange light to me. I have hope for the worthiness of this world on account of the fact that you have chosen once more to champion it, ungrateful though it has proven. Even now you say that you don’t know if it will be better for you and The People, but you fight on its behalf. It is undeserving of you, as am I.

I do not think you would write to me if you believed me irredeemable, inevitably consigned to the fate I have chosen for myself.

I would tell you that you are wrong, but I know you would disbelieve me. How I admire your untempered confidence in the face of overwhelming odds. You have always been a reminder that I do not and cannot know everything, and that sometimes the world can still surprise me for the better. Perhaps at times I may have considered you foolish in your pridefulness, but you are without a doubt what kept me hopeful as, together, we stared into the abyss.

How we dovetail so disastrously, vhenan. Unrelatedly, I’m flattered that you continue to hold my ass in such high regard.

Solas

Lavellan wants to laugh and cry at once, but remembers that she has yet to send out the other paperwork she completed the previous day. It’s better to get about the work of the day than to dwell. 

Lavellan stands at the gate amongst a retinue of Inquisition soldiers. They are riding forth from Wycome soon, and her carriage awaits. Deshanna had bid the Inquisitor farewell earlier in the morning before she left to the city hall, and only Kelleth and Hellathen remained after the others bid their farewells.

“Maybe I’ll visit you in the south, Adahlen,” Hellathen says. “I’d like to see a castle sometime.” 

Lavellan reaches out to clap her cousin’s shoulder and pull the woman into a hug. “I would like that very much, lethallan.”

When she parts from her cousin, Kelleth offers her his hand, his right arm bent at face level. “For what it’s worth, I missed you and I'll miss you again.” 

“It’s worth much more to me than you think.” Lavellan clasps his hand in hers and clenches her fist. When she releases him, she says to the two, “I was thinking about what we spoke of. Both of you. I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen to the Clan if it stays in Wycome, what will change, or how. I don’t know what a Keeper or Warleader is supposed to do here, just like I didn’t know what an Inquisitor did when I first began.”

Kelleth crosses his arms. “What’re you getting at?”

“I’m getting at saying that when the time comes, you’ll be a damned great Warleader, regardless of what a Warleader does, Kelleth. And same for you with Keeper, Hellathen.”

“That’s an empty assurance,” Kelleth says. “But I get it. It would be irresponsible of either of us to not at least try to figure it all out. Fuck, who knows. Maybe I’ll start a city watch. The guard here is shit and it would do everyone some good. And the militia’s still wrecked from all the mess with the Venatori.”

“And the clan will need a strong Keeper now more than ever if we want to stay the course of remembrance. We are the Dalish,” Hellathen recites in a serene meter, “keepers of the lost lore, walkers of the lonely path. We are the last of the Elvhenan, and no one has ever said where our journey must end. As Andraste promised the elves the Dales, her Herald grants us the city of Wycome. Maybe this is the beginning of something wonderful.” 

“You’re not suggesting a new Dalish Kingdom, are you? That didn’t end well at all the last time, but…yeah. You know what, it’s worth a shot if this goes smoothly for a few years. We don’t think small here in Clan Lavellan, do we?” Kelleth asks with a strange awe, and Hellathen shrugs and gives a tiny smile in response.

“You two sound like you have this figured out,” Lavellan laughs, and she turns to walk to the coach. “Dareth-shiral, Kelleth, Hellathen. Never again shall we submit.”

Chapter Text

Sometimes around Skyhold, the letters are delivered and returned so quickly that it is not worth writing extended screeds:

Solas,

You’ll never believe how ridiculous politics have gotten. I know you swear otherwise, but Arlathan never had anything on Orlais.

Diplomatically,

Inquisitor Lavellan

Lavellan is in a strangely great mood. She is trailed by a laughing comte from near Val Foret who titters behind his mask. Josephine, once a bard herself, has expanded her work to cover some of Leliana’s old duties, and Lavellan has been picking up the ambassador’s slack. The comte is taking great joy in informing the supposedly provincial woman on Orlesian custom. “—and there is one for each stage of mourning.”

She is always amazed by how amenable most people were when she just let them talk—it was like when Solas got too vague and mystic in his descriptions of the Fade and all Lavellan knew to do was nod and smile, except this was more inane than weird. “Do tell, Lord Arnaud. We never did have such grand hats amongst the Dalish—I imagine the Chapeau of Bargaining is quite a glory to behold.”

“Oh! But it is! Only more grand is the Mantle of Denial. But poor elven poppets. I’ve never thought of how dispossessed your race must be. What do your people wear to funerary soirees?”

The less she says, the better, and Lavellan feigns a distant sadness.

The comte gasps, and grabs her shoulders. “No, do not speak, Your Worship. I can only imagine! As you well know, we just cracked a vein of silver on my lands. I will start a charity to provide hats for the Dalish! Surely then they shall become more civilized and docile, no?” At least the silver came out organically, if not offensively.

“But that silver can only go so far if it is sold for hat money,” Lavellan says, sighing towards him. “Have you considered perhaps joining in our contract to provide arms for Tevinter? Silver is an important component in many staffs, and if Qunari forces come further south, it may threaten everything we hold dear.”

“Including the Hats of Mourning?!”

The Inquisitor bows her head solemnly. “Especially the Hats of Mourning.”

“Maker!” yelps the comte, and after that, it’s fairly easy for Lavellan to seal the deal. She loves doing things that she’s good at. It’s so much better than being drunk and sad over her vaguely evil ex-boyfriend.

 Just an hour later, an envelope falls out of nowhere as Lavellan sits in the garden reviewing details on a shipping manifest.

“Did anyone see who threw this?” Lavellan asks the other denizens of the garden as she holds the letter high and points at it with her prosthesis. They all look at her confusedly. “Right. Of course not.”

She sits down to open it:

Inquisitor,

I refuse to concede that point—I somehow doubt any Orlesian lord has ever attempted to bribe you to bind a Spirit of Libel to a chronicler’s writing desk in order to avenge a three-thousand year old wrong regarding a cursed amulet and the death of a goldfish.

I am sure this news will not come as a surprise to you, but someone may have eavesdropped on your conversation with the comte. Admittedly, I am rather curious about these dismal-sounding hats. What do you think the Cap of Acceptance looks like?

Solas

On the back of the same paper, Lavellan scrawls,

Solas,

You’re asking me? Isn’t there something lurking in the Fade that would know? But, if we’re to make a game of this, let me think. I imagine it to be a dull blue-grey beret with a lacey veil over the face, probably with some sort of glitzy silken lining on the inside. It’s only grossly ostentatious when you get close.

I never really took you for a hat person. I imagine the one you wore at the Winter Palace was what drove you to drink.

Your haberdashing hero (get it?),

Inquisitor Lavellan

She puts the letter back into the envelope and leaves it lying on the bench when she exits the garden.

 “Hmm…maybe I can work on a sound blocker barrier!” Dagna bubbles excitedly much later in the day. The sun is beginning to set on the mountain, and the air in the undercroft buzzes with a warming gold. “That way we won’t have to stand close to this terrifying sheer drop into a frozen abyss to make sure no one hears us! Hmm… so, most barriers already warp light slightly, that’s why you can see blue around them sometimes! So sound wouldn’t be too hard to block with some sort of rune module. Maybe I can use some of the theory behind the transistor crystals, only with stopping instead of going? Let’s see, I read something from the University of Orlais that says that sound travels in waves…”

“Dagna, focus,” the Inquisitor reprimands. “How long will it take for you to skim off enough silver to make it?”

“So, it really depends on the staff schematics Harritt over there uses,” Dagna admits.

“What did you say? I’m not making the staffs shoddy on your account!” the smith yells across the large chamber. “I don’t care if they’re all going to the ‘vints, if it’s got my name on it, it’s going to be a damned good weapon.”

The dwarven arcanist giggles excitedly. “Of course not, silly! Since the silver is the last component we need, once the comte’s shipments start coming in it should just take a week or two to prime the compound and run tests. Dorian is getting the optics theory worked out in Tevinter—I’ve got enough Serault glass to start fashioning the enchantment for the apparatus as soon as he gets back to me.”

“Wonderful,” Lavellan says, and she thanks Dagna and Harritt before exiting the undercroft. Unsurprisingly, a letter is left at the door.

Inquisitor,

I liked that hat. I had no idea that you regarded it with such disdain.

I actually did choose to break from work and slip into the Fade (this is a much more dignified way of saying that I fell asleep at my desk) to consult spirits that may have possessed such knowledge. You were close with your guess—the Cap of Acceptance is a grey opera hat with a ring of feathers tucked into a black band. There is an entire lace shroud descending from the brim. I think it looks rather ridiculous, but apparently, my sense in clothing, and hats especially, is not to be trusted.

Your pun was noted, and it was quite awful. I regret to inform you that we may have to break up all over again because of it.

Solas

Lavellan feels like she really needs a day or two to properly formulate a response to the last sentiment.

The Inquisitor returns to her chambers after breakfast to affix her prosthetic—she had found it unnecessary. As she enters the room, she turns to look at the mirror. She wonders if she should change her hair, but her attention is grabbed when she sees a envelope that had not been there before in her periphery.

Before she went to bed, she had left a letter reading as such on her desk:

Solas,

I would be surprised by your attempt to explicitly make a joke if that joke didn’t imply that we are currently in a relationship.

Are we together again? Because if we are, no one told me. When did this happen?

Yours?,

Inquisitor Lavellan

However, the paper she abandoned has been replaced with another envelope during her morning victuals:

Inquisitor,

I suppose I wrote the words unthinkingly. ‘Together’ might not be the proper word for it—we are, in fact, physically very far apart. Though I have resigned myself to the particular indulgence provided by the pen, I do think it would be a terrible idea for us to ever convene again in person.

As is, however, you are not only the unfortunate object of my affection, but my sole friend. It would be a lie to claim that I did not hold you in a rather singular esteem. As you are engaged in social life, placing labels, private between the two of us or not, on our semblance of a relationship would undoubtedly affect you more than it would affect me. Therefore, I shall render the decision to you.

Regardless of the words we ascribe to our entanglement, we have already caught ourselves in quite a splendid mess. History brims with tales of star-crossed lovers spinning secret threads of correspondence and commending their forlorn affections to paper. I fear, my heart, that we may be the most lost and doomed of their lot.

Solas

Solas,

Your typical fatalism and the attempt to appeal to my ego with sweeping superlatives have me swooning. However, I don’t necessarily think there are really words by which we can describe what we have going on. What would we say?

We’re lovers? That makes it sound like we’re having sex. And we’re not having sex now.

You’re my boyfriend? I honestly like this one the best, but I know it is a tad juvenile for your tastes.

We’re mortal enemies locked in a struggle over the fate of the world? Accurate, but not entirely descriptive.

“Together?” Maybe. You’ve mentioned that we are not physically close, but I suppose that doesn’t preclude emotional commitment. And how committed are we? To each other, I mean, as our unwavering dedication to making terrible decisions cannot be called into question.

There are a lot of things we must ask. It might take a while to figure it all out.

Yours,

Inquisitor Lavellan

She takes the letter and thinks of where to hide it. Lavellan doesn’t dwell on whether or not it is wrong to be somewhat happy. She has work to do, and that energizes her.

Months pass and the brisk early spring melts into the warmth of midsummer. Light breezes buffet the ramparts, and it is pleasant for Lavellan to walk from one appointment to the next in the sun.

She reads a letter she found tucked into the cushion of her throne as she edges along the battlements. She and Solas are amidst a strange series of confessions:

Inquisitor,

I do wish I could see your new haircut. I thought for a moment to ask one of my spies to describe it, but I determined that would be uncomfortable for everyone involved. I imagine that you look very lovely.

I am unsurprised to hear that you were complicit in the termite incident—Cassandra and I had surmised that Sera was not acting alone that evening. I disbelieve that you did it just for the challenge of getting the insects into the cake. All you had to do was cut the bottom out and drain the custard.

Since we are so dedicated to honesty now, is there anything more that I haven’t told you? I did inform you that almost all of my pocket money came from taking coins off Dalish shrines to Fen’Harel, correct? It is not stealing if they intended it for me. Or rather, a highly fictionalized version of me, but I think it still counts. But I also made up words and spoke in non-sequiturs whenever I felt that our travelling party was not listening to my comments on the state of the Veil in particular areas—the fact that no one seemed to notice confirmed my suspicion that none of you ever paid attention to me.

I am sorry that I do not have more exciting secrets to divulge. As often accused, I am not very much fun.

I have a question to ask of you, but you must first promise not to laugh at me.

Solas

Lavellan tucks the letter into the glove of her prosthesis as she reaches her destination.

“So, what have we got?” she asks, slipping into the Commander’s office. Cullen and Josephine are looking at a map on the desk. She has not yet told either of them about her correspondence with Solas, or their renewed relationship. The Commander and the diplomat have worked so tirelessly against his efforts, and Lavellan would not blame them for feeling betrayed.

“Hello, Inquisitor. Are you not going to silence the room?” Josephine rolls her neck slightly, as if she is sore. She and Cullen seem as if they have been studying the charts for some time.

“Let me close the door first!” Lavellan replies. Once she is in the room, she pulls a rune from her pocket and tosses it on the desk. Dagna’s contraption flashes, and suddenly, the walls of the room glow the bright blue of a barrier. “We should be ready to go.”

“I still am not over your hair,” Josephine says. “I always wear mine up, and I want to cut it off like you have, but I haven’t the courage! And the glasses—I know it has been some time, but it is all a very different look for you, Inquisitor!”

“I hope it's a good different.” Lavellan smiles slightly and adjusts the glasses on her nose. “They're just for reading, but Dorian picked out the frames for me. Give him your opinions the next time you send a letter Tevinter's way. But hmm…maybe you could go shoulder-length? I think a long bob would look good on you.”

“Oh, but I am worried about the waves…” Josephine pats her coif gently. “What if it’s too unruly, and I can’t put it up?”

Cullen clears his throat. “Ahem. Perhaps we should discuss the matters at hand instead of frivolities like hair care,” he says.

“You spend more time on your hair than either of us, Commander!” Josephine accuses, and Cullen’s cheeks turn a slight red. "Should we start by sharing updates on The Operation?"

“I would love to antagonize the Commander further, but we probably should talk about that.” Lavellan peers at the map. Lines of blue markers and giant X'es are scribbled across it. “Has anyone caught onto the trail of the lyrium we’re procuring for Merrill?” The elf had been researching eluvians for months, and massive amounts of the substance were necessary for her work—sabotaging the eluvian pathways is an ambitious goal.

“Yes,” Cullen answers. “In addition to them likely using the leaks in our financial information, someone in the Dwarven Merchants' Guild was bribed to tell what we were paying them for. I’m looking for an alternate supplier as we speak. I’m hoping someone comes back to me on it today.”

Lavellan cringes. “Fuck, are we dead in the water on this, then? Should you even bother?”

“I think The Operation is still viable. It seems that no one is certain about what the lyrium is for. One of our double agents has told us that Fen’Harel’s network believes that we are outfitting a secret templar unit.”

“I shall try to encourage the rumors,” Josephine inserts. “I can seed tales in the halls of great homes claiming that there may be some brave Ser under the banner of the Inquisition fighting Qunari saarebas and cults of malificarum—it will not take them long to manifest in common tavern songs, as many minstrels who entertain nobles also sing for the common folk. Searching for the nonexistent truth among the lies may distract our enemies from ferretting out our real purpose.”

“But the delivery of the lyrium hasn’t been traced?” Lavellan asks.

Cullen furrows his brow. “I couldn’t say—they are in danger of being discovered at any moment. But Harding is leading the transport team, and I’ve faith in the woman.”

Lavellan nods. “How are we with spies?” She herself doesn’t keep anything of import in her desk anymore, as she knows it is unbelievably unsecure.

“I am still figuring out who has been going through the bookkeeping,” answers Josephine. Lavellan takes a mental note of it. The financial spying should be dealt with. The diplomat continues, “And I’ve begun to request kindly that our contacts take the letters from the birds themselves. It is difficult to tell how safe it is. Fen’Harel—“ she looks directly at Lavellan— “Solas does not often use the information he takes, so I do not know how much he has.”

“Well, they keep looking at my charts,” Cullen sighs. “Or rather, the files of fake ones I have. They started folding them properly when they put them back a while ago, but sometimes they curl the corners slightly when they’re holding them, or face the files the wrong way. Once someone let one of the pens I had in that chest roll away from the other ones. If they keep making such messes, I’ll never stop catching them. I don’t think anyone has been in the real ones. I can’t be certain.”

“Anything else?” Lavellan asks.

Josephine nods. “We figured out that the entire scullery staff of Caer Bronach was comprised of Viddathari humans. Leliana is taking care of it—she still gathers information for the Chantry out of there, and she is livid.” Sometimes, Lavellan forgets about the Qun. Her other shadow battle has much higher stakes.

They discuss other such matters for a while longer, and finally Lavellan deactivates the barrier. “You two are doing good work,” she says. "Thank you."

A knock comes at the door. “Commander? Commander? We’ve Knight-Captain Rylen’s reports for you!”

“I don’t think he’s even in there, Moss.”

“O-oh!” Cullen jumps and runs to the door to open it. Two men, one elven and one human, carry overflowing boxes full of papers. Through the lens of her glasses, Lavellan stares at their hands before edging past them out the door. “How long have you soldiers been waiting?”

Lavellan lurks in barracks with a letter she wrote in her hand. It reads:

Solas,

I'm so glad that you don't keep big, important secrets from your friends. Oh, wait a minute.

Here’s another confession for you: Remember that innkeeper that thought you and our dear Mister Rainier were a couple and insisted on placing you two in that room with one really tiny bed? Well, Varric and I may have spent about three hours telling her of your love over drinks while Blackwall Thom was betting on a nug fight and you…well, I think you were staring at the ceiling? Or a hole in the ceiling? I’m not sure.

This was fairly shortly after Adamant, and Varric got to talking about Hawke, and apparently they used to play some game where they would go out and convince a stranger of something ridiculous, like that they were health inspectors or Orlesian sommeliers or something. I said it sounded fun, and Varric invited me to play with him. Of course I had to take him up on it.

I must admit that the idea for the ruse was mine, but Varric sure loved it. A direct quote, to the best of my memory: “Oh, that’s so great. Chuckles and Hero’ll be so confused if anyone ever brings it up. Twenty silver that they won’t even manage to deny it.”

So we start by attracting the innkeeper’s attention. I say loudly, and please, darling, do brace yourself for this, “I’m so glad that my dad found love again. He was so sad for so long after mother’s passing. I am grateful he is happy, even in the arms of a human man,” and after that, it was so easy for Varric and me to make her believe us. She conceived of the idea of giving you two the honeymoon suite free of charge herself, though.

You never did tell us what happened in that cozy inn room. In absence of the information, Varric and I may have written a short play about your special evening on a napkin. I think he still may have it somewhere. Let me try to remember it:

Act 1, Scene 1.

(The curtains rise, and the scene is a room in an Orlesian inn. It is pleasant and homey, and two men sit in their smallclothes upon a bed. They are both older, but they are not over the proverbial hill. The fires of their youth burn bright in their hearts…and perhaps somewhere else? Ah, yes. The word for that place is ‘loins.’)

SOLAS: It is unfortunate that we must share this rather small bed.

BLACKWALL: We’ll live. In the Wardens, we would sleep fifty men and two archdemons to a single bedroll.

SOLAS: Indeed. If we are to be in such proximity, let us become closer friends. Do we have much in common?

(The elven apostate lays down.)

BLACKWALL: Hmm. Well. I love being a middle-aged man.

SOLAS: Same. Do tell me, what is it like to have hair, Blackwall? I seek the answers in the Fade, but, alas, wise spirits will not share with me their knowledge of the subject.

BLACKWALL: It’s hairy. Sometimes there is so much beard on my face that I can’t live with the burden. I think of shaving, but I’m unsure of how to work a razor.

SOLAS: No, you mustn’t shave. Think of those who must go without!

BLACKWALL: Do you really not have any hair?

SOLAS: Not on my head.

BLACKWALL: Oh, so you have some on your…other head. Very interesting.

(The swordsman joins the mage in the bed, which is tilted in such a way that the audience can see both of their faces and prone bodies.)

SOLAS: Your interest is noted.

BLACKWALL: Uhm…Solas, did you bring your staff into the bed with us?

SOLAS: The Veil is aroused tonight.

(The lights dim and the scene fades to black as the two turn to embrace one another. Sensual pan flute music plays.)

Fin.

In hindsight, you and Rainier could have talked about the joys of lying about one’s identity for a bit, but Varric and I only had so much information to work with at the time. Please send back your opinions on this literary masterpiece.

What were you going to ask me anyways? I probably won't laugh,

Inquisitor Lavellan

The elven guard who had delivered the reports to Cullen enters the room alone and heads to his bunk. Lavellan intercepts him by leaning in the low, vaulted doorway. “Hello, friend," Lavellan greets.

“In…Inquisitor!” he sputters.

“What’s your name, soldier?” she asks. A small grin crosses her face.

“F-f-fallon, Your Worship. I’m called Fallon.”

“Well, F-f-fallon,” Lavellan mimics with a smile, “could you do me a favor and hand this off to the Dread Wolf for me? The contents are of a very delicate nature.” She extends to him a sealed envelope.

“Yes, ma’am. Yes,” Fallon shakes slightly as Lavellan hands him the letter and saunters off.

Fallon the compromised spy approaches Lavellan as she reads a book of Orlesian philosophy on the lawn. She's almost conversational on the subject.

“You haven’t vanished yet?” she asks him. Lavellan is honestly surprised.

“I don’t know what to do with myself,” Fallon admits dejectedly, and hands Lavellan a sealed envelope. “He says this is for you.”

“Well, at least you’re honest,” Lavellan shrugs. As Fallon walks away, Lavellan calls after him, “Thank you! Stay out of other people's belongings!”

Lavellan weighs down the bulk of the envelope with her prosthetic as she carefully tears the flap away to open it:

Inquisitor,

You claimed I was your father? I remember you making it explicitly clear to me that you weren’t into that sort of thing.

You are unbelievable sometimes. But if you wish to know what happened between Thom Rainier and me that evening, I shall inform you of the exact occurrence: We confusedly entered the room, and after the innkeeper left, Rainier asked if I would prefer it that he switch sleeping arrangements with you. I admitted I was too tired to care, and he said he felt the same way. Although we were slightly too close to one another for our liking, we were both asleep within ten minutes.

Anyways, here is the question that I have intended to ask: How do you keep plants from dying? I have been trying to grow a few potted plants to brighten my living quarters, but they will not stay alive. I do recall that you kept a planter of Andraste’s Grace near your desk and that it seemed to be doing well for a long while.

Another confession: The health of the flower only took a turn for the worse when I attempted to water it—its decline was sudden and tragic, and likely all my fault. I am incredibly sorry for killing your plant, Inquisitor.

Solas

Lavellan has paper and a pen on her, and she lays out on her stomach, scrawling a response amidst the blades of grass:

Fen’Harel, Dreadest of Wolves, Scourge of Dalish Mythology, Destructor of Elvhenan, and Harbinger of the End of Days,

I forgive you for murdering my houseplant.

Why am I unsurprised that you’re a terrible plant dad? Maybe your head is too far in the clouds to properly take care of flowers. You’ve come to the wrong person for advice, though—the Andraste’s Grace was a gift from Leliana and it was honestly a miracle that it lasted as long as it did. I usually entrust the greenery to the herbalist, though, so you might want to find one of those, or maybe ask some spirit that’s really into gardening.

I do know that you can’t directly water Andraste’s Grace, though. Everyone knows that. Except, apparently, for you, and you know everything. I know you asked me not to laugh, but I’m laughing. The idea of you of all people being unable to keep a plant alive is too endearing to me.

I know I haven’t said this directly in a long while, but I love you. For better or for worse. And I refuse to resign myself to the idea that it will all be for worse.

In Memoriam of All Your Plants,

Inquisitor Lavellan

When the sky fades to a deep and mellow purple and the fireflies lazily amble through the air, Lavellan stands to go to the tavern. She abandons the letter and heads to the building exuding beckoning light and sound.

There is a week’s delay in the delivery of the next letter, and it is incredibly short. Lavellan is somewhat unsettled by it all:

Adahlen,

I love you, too. Please know that.

Solas

P.S. I apologize that I have been busy—I have been working against the machinations of the Qun. For you convenience, I have compiled a list of Viddathari spies in your organization and close associate groups, including the Chantry hierarchy. It is enclosed in this letter.

Chapter Text

Mother Carine was a prominent community leader in the Halamshiral alienage, one of Andraste’s devout by all accounts. It was a surprise to no one who knew her when she was selected to be the first ordained elven priest under Divine Victoria, and a surprise to everyone who knew her when she was revealed to be a spy of the Qun. 

As the light of dusk dies in the summer sky, the elven woman is dragged from Leliana’s office in the cathedral by Inquisition guards, sobbing out laments in Qunlat. She breaks into the common tounge: “Please, no! Your Worship, Your Perfection! I have information I can give to you!” 

“Yes, you can give us information, and you will,” Lavellan says, leaning back against the gilded wood paneling of the room.

”I’ll be a double agent for you, Par Vollen will never know I was caught by the Inquisition!”

“No, the Qun definitely already knows,” the Inquisitor again counters with a shrug, tilting her head out the door.

“She was Viddathari from the beginning of her public life,” Leliana says, her nostrils flared as she leans over the desk. The Divine stares intently down the hallway at the panicking woman. “She only acted her part to rub elbows with those in the Chantry and glean information. My edict opening the priesthood to elves must have been the most exciting moment of her life.”

Echoes of shouts in Qunlat can be heard down the hall. 

“She really should stop screaming that. We're in a church, after all.” The Iron Bull sits at a desk pouring over piles of papers. The former Qunari had been called to Val Royeaux to help with the matter, and the furniture looks comically small in comparison to his massive frame. “Never thought I’d be looking over Ben-Hassrath reports again, but here I am, ‘cause I’m the only one that can read Qunlat. I’m surprised you saved all these, Red.” He shakes his horned head. “But yeah, so far, it looks consistent. That Carine lady could be the informant in almost all of these.”

“Thank you for coming in at short notice,” Leliana says as Lavellan paces the room.

“So, how’d you catch her?” Bull asks, still peering at the reports with his one eye. 

Four Inquisition soldiers flank the door of the large Chantry study—two humans and two elves, one of which Lavellan recognizes as Loranil, a Dalish man she recruited on the Exalted Plains long ago. He whispers something to the other elf: “Are you feeling okay, Wynda?”

“In a private conversation with Carine, I personally leaked information to her about the Inquisition seizing gaatlock from Qunari operatives,” Lavellan explains. She’d gone about confirming Solas’s information in her own way. “We set up a fake storage location at an abandoned warehouse, and a bunch of Qunari came to take the bait.”

“Huh.” Bull frowns slightly and narrows his eye. “But why did you suspect her to begin with? She’s been a spy for a long time, what did she finally give on?”

“I was wondering that too,” mumbles Leliana, but she immediately starts thinking aloud to herself. “Oh, this will be such a nightmare for public relations. Carine was so beloved.” Bull still stares at Lavellan.

“We spoke recently, and she seemed to know too much when I mentioned our efforts against the Qun,” Lavellan lies, and Bull lets out another ‘huh.’ He does not seem to be buying her story. Lavellan is not about to admit to the Iron Bull that Solas had given her Carine’s name. 

At that moment, another Inquisition guard rushes into the door. “Divine Victoria. Inquisitor, we went to Carine’s apartments at the Old Quarter Chantry. It looks like the Qun knows she’s been compromised. They’d taken near everything by the time we got there. The desk’s been stripped down of all her writings, and the books are gone.”

“Fuck,” Lavellan swears. “Bull, do you think they might have left anything?”

“Arrrgh, who knows. We should get there fast to see for ourselves. Knowing the Qun, they’ve got people coming back with gaatlock as we speak to blow the place to the sky.”

“Let’s go,” Lavellan says, and the elf at the door begins to cough and falls to her knees, Loranil diving to catch her as she covers her mouth. She voids the contents of her bowels onto the marble floor of the Chantry office, coughing still.

“I’m so sorry, Your Worships,” she whimpers. “I’ve been sick all day. I didn’t want to…I thought…I thought I would be all right. I feel dizzy. Could I return to my—“ 

The timing was too convenient. Lavellan is wary of her, but will not be cruel. She doesn’t let her finish the sentence. “Leliana, could you have someone get her water and something to clean off with? Maybe get in touch with a herbalist? I think it’s best for our soldier that she stays here and rests.” The elf on the floor visibly tenses and lets out a groan as Lavellan shoves past the group, delicately avoiding the puddle of vomit as her gait speeds.

Loranil, having abandoned Wynda’s side, follows the Iron Bull and the Inquisitor out into the hallway. “I’m sorry, Inquisitor, for interrupting, but…” he pauses and takes a deep breath, the distortion of his vallaslin betraying the tenseness of his face. “She made herself throw up. When she was on the floor coughing and thought no one could tell, she put her fingers down her throat. I was right there.”

Lavellan nods. “Tell Divine Victoria discreetly.” She wonders if the guard is working for Solas or the Qun, or perhaps some other faction. Another spy is not all that surprising. She figures she will have time to sort the matter out later.

The Inquisitor and the Iron Bull walk through the cramped halls of the Old Quarter Chantry. The neighborhood enclave is one of the oldest buildings in Val Royeaux, and its dark nooks smell of settled centuries of quiet contemplation. “Thank you, soldiers. Stay vigilant,” Lavellan says to two dwarven Inquisition soldiers in the hallway of the attic. They bow their heads in deference, and their hands remain near their weapons.

Lavellan and Bull enter the dark apartment illuminated only by the moonlight outside and what torchlight spilled in from the hallway. Bull bows his head under the door, tilting his horns so they won’t catch on the frame. The small bed outfitting the room has simple, rough-hewn sheets and the only only décor Lavellan sees is a small icon of Andraste made of painted wood. The desk and the closet have been ransacked, presumably by Qunari agents. 

“She was dedicated to playing the part of the devoted Chantry Mother,” Lavellan observes.

“Of course she’s dedicated,” Bull grunts. “She's Hissrad. Hissrad are always dedicated. Even if she thought Andrasteism was bas nonsense, she probably actually liked the public service and all that asceticism junk.”

“Just like you actually liked hitting things with big swords?” As she muses, Lavellan tilts up the mattress, and looks beneath onto the wooden slats. She finds nothing more than a small, limp coin purse that contains a few gold pieces and booking manifests for ships north. Carine was ready to flee, if necessary.

“Yeah, pretty much. For the really good spies, it has to be part real. Hey, boss, could you move a bit? I’m gonna shift the desk. Stuff falls down behind these all the time, especially when people are in a hurry to take everything and get in and out of the room.” The Iron Bull looks out the window, craning his muscular neck. “Hm, that’s the only entrance to the stairwell up to here. Good, if they come back to torch this place, we’ll be able to see them coming. It’d be nice if you could keep watch. Should be secure between that and the guards.” Lavellan’s longsword is at her side. It’s never seen actual combat. For a faltering moment, she realizes that she will not be able to use it competently if fighting becomes necessary.

Bull continues, “Why haven’t they blown this up already? The Ben-Hassrath tends to be on top of wiping evidence from the face of the continent. Maybe all the Viddathari operatives down here don’t have gaatlock on hand?” He thinks aloud as takes the desk into hand and heaves it, a loud creaking noise sounding from the movement of the old wood. “Here we are!” the big man roars, bending to pick up some sheets of paper. “Oh-ho yeah, this is all in Qunlat—confirms that Carine’s the source on some of the reports Red saved, too. There might be some recent info in here, if we're lucky. Whoever picked this over is sloppy.”

Lavellan stares out the window as Bull goes through the things he’s found. A folded sheet of paper lays on the floor near the wall, and Lavellan tentatively bends down to pick it up and observe the Qunari note for herself. It’s not in Qunlat, she immediately realizes.

“This is clearly a note from her to someone else, probably some Salit, that never got delivered—says ‘I don’t think he’s on to me. I can get in as I wish, but I don’t have the key. I’ll try to get it to you soon.’ Who’s ‘he?’ Maybe it’s talking about some important Chancellor or Chantry benefactor?” Bull mumbles, talking through his own work. In some odd capacity, the ex-Ben-Hassrath agent is enjoying himself.

Lavellan cannot say the same for herself as she reads the note in her hand. It is another letter from Mother Carine that was never delivered:

Tyrias,

I’ve been trying to deduce who this mysterious templar that the Inquisition supplies lyrium to might be. Perhaps from that we can discover where he is. It has mostly been in idle chatter amongst Chantry guards and sisters, but someone mentioned that he could be from Kirkwall. The Commander is from the city, and would know and trust a man who worked for him. It would make sense that the Inquisition is keeping this templar’s name secret as well as his mission—the Gallows are still infamous for their crimes.

I have already sent as much and more to the Dread Wolf, but I thought you might want to pursue the line of questioning yourself in your own investigations at the docks. I am afraid of him, but I will trust in you.

Your Loving Carine

Lavellan has never thought of herself as violent, prone to take her anger out on others and things, but the impulse is suddenly there. Something has to come crashing down, and it will not be her. 

Her mouth cannot and will not say anything, but her right fist swings at the window, and it shatters, the panes cracking with the force of her body and the dragon’s blood which still pumps in her veins. Shards of the thick pane cut her glove and the skin beneath, and she feels the wetness of her blood before she feels any hurt.

“Boss! What the shit, boss?!”

“She wasn’t just a Qunari spy,” the Inquisitor spits out finally. There was a reason that Solas gave her Mother Carine’s name. Lavellan knows that she has been used.

Lavellan has not spoken to anyone since she returned to the Chantry offices, instead choosing to go straight to her own quarters.

She scribbles on a sheet of paper: 

Kill your own fucking leaks and don’t make me do it for you, you lying son of a bitch. My Inquisition is not your tool. I am not your plaything.

A dot or two of blood find their way onto the paper. Almost unthinkingly, she smears them into the stationery. She’s spitefully happy that they soil her note.

Lavellan folds up the paper, shoves it into her vest, and descends the stairs. She does not know what she will do with the letter, but she is certain that some spy lurks nearby. Her question was answered when she runs into Loranil. “Your Worship,” interjects the young Dalish man. “Sorry that I don’t seem…Wynda was a friend, and learning this…” Loranil stops. “He was your friend, too. So I shouldn’t—”

“What do you mean?” Lavellan all but snaps. For a moment, she isn’t even sure who Wynda is.

“Oh, I thought someone would have told you already. My apologies, Your Worship. Sincerely. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. We…questioned Wynda. My post partner, I mean. She was supposed to pass off news about what you were doing about Mother Carine to Fen’Harel. It’s why she faked being sick, she thought she’d be able to—“

“Thank you, Loranil,” Lavellan says, trying to suppress the hate curdling in her stomach. “She’s being held in the guard barracks?”

“Yes, Your Worship.”

Lavellan storms her way into the low-lit barracks to see a terrified Wynda slumped in a chair and flanked by the templars who guarded at the cathedral. The spy of Fen’Harel does not seem like she has been injured in her questioning, and Lavellan chokes back disgust at herself for wishing that she were. “Release her,” Lavellan demands of the guards at the side of Wynda’s chair.

A redheaded female templar begins, “Excuse me, your worship, but wha—“

“I’ve a task for her,” Lavellan interrupts, and she pulls the letter from her breast pocket and shoves it to Wynda’s chest. The spy falls further back in the chair slightly, moved by the force. “Take this to him. If you ever cross the path of the Inquisition again, I guarantee it will mean the end of your life.”

“You let that Wynda woman go?” spits Leliana. “We could have questioned her further! Have you gone mad over your lover? I advised you to use the channel of correspondence to your best advantage. I did not think that you would—“ She shakes her head, seething beneath her vestments.

“That I would what? If you’re going to admonish me, say what you are going to say,” Lavellan replies. She flexes her right hand. The cuts are really beginning to hurt. The Inquisitor continues, “But thank you for reminding me, Your Perfection, that you encouraged this bullshit.”

“You are blaming me?!” Leliana asks, and Lavellan immediately feels some shame for her last accusation. But she is not willing to admit wrong, at least not now. “That is just incorrigible. I said to use him, not trust him!”

Lavellan leaps to her own defense. “I didn’t trust him! I never acted on his information without confirming it.”

“Yes, but you believed him when he told you his motives for feeding you that information. I thought you were smarter than that. But no! You let him use you!” The Divine stops for a moment and shakes her head again. “I’m not sure if it’s better or worse that I know you would have been wary of anyone other than Solas.”

Lavellan doesn’t defend herself. There is nothing she can say that will make it less humiliating. Her face contorts in shame.

“At…at least the damage has been minimal. Nonexistent, even. This could have come to a head over worse things. And Mother Carine was leaking Chantry secrets to the Qun. That one had her fingers in every pie,“ Leliana sighs. The holy woman is looking very hard for the good in the situation, but her disapproval over Lavellan’s actions is still clear. “You should not have let the spy walk free. Perhaps if Carine was spying on Solas’s people for the Qun, she might have information…I will think on this. Inquisitor. You should tell Cullen and Josephine. They deserve to know what you’ve been doing.” Leliana sits down at her desk, and Lavellan turns to leave the room. Though Leliana seems calmer, Lavellan is not. Neither can bear being near the other for much longer.

The Inquisitor leaves Leliana’s office, and is not sure where she is going. To her quarters, perhaps. To anywhere else. To walk and not stop walking.

A courier wearing a Chantry sigil is waiting for her in the long marble hallway. “I was told you were in here,” she says. “I’ve got a delivery for you—was told it was urgent by the fellow who passed it off.”

The Inquisitor snatches the paper from the courier, not processing what the express delivery likely is. Maybe she thanks her. Maybe she doesn’t. Lavellan tears open the corner of the envelope with her teeth to get inside. 

Inquisitor,

Do not even begin to pretend that you have been entirely forthright with me.

Still, I am sorry. I did what had to be done.

Solas

Lavellan hates him, and she wants to tear the letter to pieces, but cannot with one hand. She barely restrains herself from using her teeth once more to destroy it. Instead, she crumples it up in her palm and throws the note to the floor as her body begins to heave with choked-back sobs. Though few haunt the Chantry halls late in the evening, she is in public and her actions are embarrassing.

Like a damned fool, she had let her guard down, and had been taken as a lovesick idiot again.

It has been a long time since Lavellan felt so pathetic. Something had to come crashing down, and there was nothing it could be but her.

Chapter Text

Lavellan lays in a flowerbed, and the sky above her is hollow, green tinges dancing through an eternal echoing emptiness. She wonders if she can see the Void if she stares hard enough into the nothingness, and the concept of quiet nothingness becomes relaxing. The smell of floral detritus is stronger than it should be, and she feels as if she is slowly sinking. She likes that part. She wants to be swallowed up, to have her arms and legs subsumed by the earth. “What do you want?” Lavellan asks her visitor. She only sees part of him in her periphery, and even that is enough to appall her.

“I was concerned for you,” Solas says. “One of my spies on the cathedral’s cleaning staff informed me that you’d thrown away the letter. He said you seemed unwell. It is interesting that the Anchor has so permanently affected your connection with the Fade, despite the fact that it is no longer present—not even mages should be able to be here in your capacity unassisted.”

A new source of discontent wells up within Lavellan, and she doesn’t respond.

“A flowerbed."

Lavellan never thought that Solas would come this close to her in the Fade, even if he had watched her for so long. “Just drop it.” She pauses and adds, “For what it’s worth, I probably actually am in a flowerbed.” It wasn’t the first time Lavellan has passed out drunk in public, but it’s certainly been a few years. She is grateful that the inebriation of her body did not follow her mind into the Fade.

“Would you like me to have someone find you and bring you to your quarters?” Lavellan has not yet looked at Solas’s face, or the projection of such in the Fade, but far too much worry can be found within his voice for her liking.

“I don’t want any of your people anywhere near me. Just let me die. Or better yet, come stab me to death.”

“You are being overdramatic, da’len.”

Lavellan sits up to look at Solas. He is just as handsome and just as worthy of her hatred as ever, and wears dark, plain colors that accentuate the paleness of his skin and the greyness of his eyes. She doesn’t like noticing. She braces herself on her forearms, plural, as she rights herself—she hardly notices her replaced limb as she makes eye contact. “Don’t treat me like I’m a child.”

An edge enters Solas’s voice, and the sharpness of the sound echoes throughout the open nothingness. “I will stop treating you as a child when you stop acting like one.”

Lavellan stands to look him in the eye, her limbs heavy even on the anti-physical plane. She won’t let him talk down to her, figuratively or literally. “So how am I supposed to act?”

Solas responds coldly, “Less poorly than you have up to this point.”

“Well, look what I’ve got two of here,” Lavellan says, and she holds up her hands, the middle finger on each raised. Solas shakes his head in exasperation, and Lavellan turns to leave, though she does not know where she is going. She hopes that it will take her away from him. She is shrouded in a strange fog as she goes, but she forges on. She wonders if she can wake up on will, or if anyone has found her unconscious form.

“I owe you an explanation. I had to go through the Inquisition, and I could not chance you knowing what purpose you served. I did not want the Qun to think I knew of their operatives within my ranks. That information might have jeopardized my designs against them. You were never supposed to find proof connecting Mother Carine to me—whatever evidence you found was overlooked.” Lavellan spins to face Solas, and he is much closer than she thought he would be. She cannot help notice the light freckles that dapple the bridge of his nose, and she is disgusted by the whole of him. She has the capacity for a left hook back and she wants to punch him. 

“You think that I didn’t have that all figured out? How stupid do you think I am?“ She feels a pang in her chest, and she really wants to punch him, but at once she feels sick and deflated. “You know exactly, I guess,” Lavellan admits dejectedly. He has deceived her once more, and she has only herself to blame. She may hate him, but hates herself more. Solas reaches out for Lavellan, and she swats his hand away. At once, it is more and less contact than she wants with him. “Don’t you dare touch me. I don’t care if this isn’t real, I, I…just don’t touch me.”

Solas shuts his eyes, holding them closed as he rubs his hand. “Whether or not this is real is a matter of debate.”

“Oh, shut up! How many people on that list were your problems? I suppose you would have had me go on none the wiser that I’d done your dirty work?”

“You have used our exchange of letters to compromise two or three of my less careful agents—you watch from where they vanish and heed who is gone at what times. It is not wholly effective, but as I have, you too attempt to play the situation to your advantage. Do not be hypocritical.” 

The vapor universe whirls and teeters around them on the cusp of dissolution in response to Lavellan’s bubbling animosity. “Don’t you dare compare the two of us, you disingenuous creep! My ends justify the means that I used!” 

“Lethallan—“ 

“Don’t appeal to our shared blood!” she cuts him off. The lines on her face are warped by her hateful glower. “You were manipulating me! I trapped your agents, but I never lied to you. You said you loved me, and I thought—“ Lavellan can’t find a way to finish the sentence without sounding foolish and naïve, like a silly child who had no business fighting a war that would determine the fate of the world.

Solas shakes his head sadly, and is quiet for half a moment more. “Would you rather that I say I never loved you, then? To claim as much would be a lie.”

Lavellan cannot believe him, and forces out an empty cackle. Momentum takes the grating laugh the rest of the way. “Because you have a problem with lying to me. Right.”

Solas calls Lavellan by her title: “Inquisitor—“

She responds in kind, spitting it as an epithet: “Fen’Harel.”

“Adahlen.”

Lavellan gives a long exhale. She is tired, and realizes that she probably cannot punch Solas in this realm unless he lets her. If she takes a swing, he might actually do that. The idea of Solas allowing her to punch him in an act of self-effacing resignation disgusts Lavellan, and she shakes the thought out of her head. Lavellan wants to hurt him, but here she cannot.

She is a lone woman in a deity’s dominion, and all she has is words, the worst of which he has already consigned himself to embodying. Lavellan is at a loss for action, and she is terrified. She resolves to make him rue the day he crossed her when she returns to the waking world, but for now she can only ask a question: “Why do I keep trying with you, Solas? I shouldn't have let this happen." 

Solas doesn’t answer. The mist grows heavy and still around them as an uneasy calm settles, and he finally poses his own query. “Would you prefer to talk somewhere else?”

Lavellan wants to tell him that she doesn’t care, doesn’t want an extended conversation, but instead she says, “Just don’t make it look like the Cathedral. Or anywhere like my bedroom or Skyhold’s rotunda.” 

“Very well,” Solas says, and he shuts his eyes once more.

They come to a large and empty stonework room illuminated by light from some distant aperture. Weathered murals of wolves and dragons engaged in battles with gripping monsters line the wall in a scene of blood sport that only seems static when Lavellan looks directly at it. Tendrils of vegetation long dead puncture the cracks in the fresco and masonry, and even in the Fade an echo of the sad smell of dust and desertion leaks through the air. “Where are we?” Lavellan asks, taking in the desolately lonely space.

“We are in a ruin from the time of Elvhenan,” Solas says, and Lavellan shoots him a dirty look.

“Really, Solas? Really?” 

He tilts his head in response, his pointed ears looking almost askew as his firm frown dissolves with a tiny chuckle. “I suppose that it is not a satisfying answer, but I cannot divulge any further detail. We are where I am staying, as of now. Or rather a facsimile of it, if we are to be precise about these things. Still, andaran-atishan.”

Lavellan looks around the antechamber, which seems like a desolate ruin, and finds scarce furnishings pushed into a corner and the frame of a single eluvian against the wall. In the Fade, the mirror is dark. “Is it this empty in the physical world?”

“I have never needed much.”

“Yes, I know.”

Almost awkwardly, Solas offers, “There is, ah, a balcony, if you would rather speak there. It is a little more pleasant, or at least I think so.”

It was difficult to hear him offer her niceties, no matter how paltry. “I wouldn’t hate that.”

Solas motions with his hand, and together the two walk through the open hall, their footsteps echoing with a gentle but unnatural noise. A quiet settles between the elves as they cross by the sparse bedroom set that Solas has accumulated and a desk piled with papers. There is a planter on the desk hosting a single limp and withered stalk slumping forth from the dirt. Of course Solas kills plants, inadvertently or not. Everything he touches is tainted by death.

A silence continues as they cross the threshold of the balcony, and Lavellan breaks it. “What is your ideal end?” she asks, looking out over a mirror-like lake and forested valley. The trees are not quite defined and their shivering masses shift into one another beneath dancing peaks moved by an inexplicable dynamism. As her eyes follow their trunks downwards, they sink into an endless oblivion. The Fade’s winds stir around her, hardly powerful enough to ruffle her short hair. 

Solas blinks, turning to Lavellan. He was clearly not expecting such a question. “To what?”

“To everything,” Lavellan clarifies. “So I know. You tear the Veil down, and what?” She wants him to say something vile so she can get mad.

“Elvhenan rises once more in its glory,” he says, “and avoids the mistakes of old. And if we speak now of the true ideal, I would like to somehow die. Little will remain of me when I am done—I do not think I will care then about the blood that will stain these hands, but my current self would not want to live like that.”

Lavellan cannot help her curiosity: “Have you ever thought about it before? Dying.” She leans against a support for the balcony’s stone awning, her projected knees weak.

Trace vestiges of a smile form on Solas’s face. “Yes. Many times during our adventures. While death is not an inevitability for me, it is not as if I cannot be killed. Hearing as much must come as a relief to you.”

“You know that I don’t want you dead, Solas,” Lavellan admits. “For me, ideally…for me, you’d wake up tomorrow and decide this was all a terrible idea, and come apologize for the trouble you’ve put us all through. But that’s not going to happen.”

What could be called a smile is vanished from Solas’s face, his mouth drawing itself in a grim line. It is as if he wants to be happy in her presence, but knows he cannot be. “No, it will not. I know you have said it is not worth anything to you, but I am sorry." 

The Inquisitor jumps at the chance to renew her anger. “If you know it means nothing, why do you keep saying you are?” Lavellan, galvanized in her stance against him, straightens up. “And you’re really not sorry. If you were, you wouldn’t carry out your insane plan! No one is making you do anything.”

“You cannot understand,” Solas says, and Lavellan, a nostril flared, opens her mouth to protest, but he cuts her off: “Not because you are stupid, or somehow inferior to me. I do not intend to condescend.” As far as Lavellan is concerned, this is a first. “It is because you lack my context, just as I lack the context that allows you to see irreplaceable value in this world.” Knowing that he’d taken her words about perspective into consideration is hardly comforting.

“It shouldn’t be so hard to see,” Lavellan argues. “I know everything’s a mess. Everything’s been a mess age after age after age. It’ll probably continue to be a mess. But we—everyone we, elves and humans and dwarves and Qunari—are people, and we are here, and we are trying to create a good world.”

Solas’s expression softens very slightly. “You are too optimistic, da’len.” Solas has a long history of leveling the last word at her as some sort of chiding pejorative, but this time it is almost tender. That makes it worse.

Lavellan ignores the sentiment. “Perhaps there will never be anything like Arlathan again. And that’s all right, because honestly, it doesn’t sound much better than here. If we’re limited, it’s only by your standards. Would you kill a crippled man for being unable to walk?” She reflexively clenches her left hand. It is not there in the physical world, and she remembers that she will likely never be able to fight competently again. 

“It is not the same, and you know it.” 

“How? Both are fucked up things to do. You’re denying everyone self-determination!” Lavellan fully intended the next accusation to sting: “You’re no better than the Qun.”

From his facial expression, it hits home, but Solas does not react with the defensive anger Lavellan wants him to. It would be easier if he were hateful, raving. He looks away from her, down off the balcony into the shuffling landscape, which mottles itself with brilliant swellings of emerald and jade. “I can see why you might believe that. But the Qun seeks to designate, to relegate, to limit. I intend to create for elves a new realm of possibility.”

“And you would let most everyone die to do that?” Lavellan shakes her head, fumbling for words. “I don’t understand. You were always more kind-hearted than I, and this—“ She can’t finish. She’d loved him for it. 

“Thank you. I mean that. But you’re kinder than you give yourself credit for,” accuses Solas, “and much less pragmatic. It would have been a wise move to oust every elf from the Inquisition on the chance that they could be a spy, and yet you employ them still.”

“I’m an elf, Solas. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

Solas raises a brow and the vestiges of a smile again cross his face. “I may have caught that.” 

“Come on, that was hardly a joke,” admonishes Lavellan. She remembers that he always found her to be funny, and for less than half a second she is comfortable. She takes a few steps to stand by his side. “I won’t lie and say that I hadn’t considered the idea. But I won’t betray elves. I can’t. I’ve done so much to support them—to support us— and couldn’t have gotten as far as I did without their help. It wouldn’t just be politically and militarily stupid to turn against The People as a whole, it would be wrong.” She seeks to spite Solas by obfuscating anything that might prove his point, so she adds, “Plus, I think I can win against you even with a handicap.”

“Do not try to hide it. You are principled. I would not have ever regarded you so highly if you were not.” Solas doesn’t look at her as he makes his next conversational venture: “My people in your forces don’t do what they do out of antipathy for the Inquisition or its goals. Many are in fact are proud to serve your interests while this world lasts. They think you are at your heart righteous, but short-sighted.” Lavellan remembers Bull’s words: It has to be part real.

“I thought you didn’t talk to your agents,” Lavellan says, leaning on the bannister and staring out over the poor imitation of a landscape. She doesn’t want to look at him either.

“I do ask salient questions. How my nemesis is regarded amongst her people is a relevant matter, is it not?”

“I’m surprised no one’s said that I’m a huge bitch,” Lavellan admits.

“I merely said that they approve of your leadership,” Solas laughs, “not that they like you personally. Though I think they enjoy your person more than they do mine, and your recent initiative of saying ‘thank you’ more often has been well-received.”

Lavellan glares towards him, narrowing her eyes almost jokingly. Solas glances at her, and she can’t help but give him a grin, and his physicality relaxes in response. “Remember when I called you a disingenuous creep about ten minutes ago? I was emphasizing the ‘disingenuous’ part before, but now I want to more heavily weight ‘creep.’”

“Harsh words, vhenan.” He is smiling and so very handsome and plies her with terms of endearment, at it makes everything so much more wrong.

“What are you playing at?” Lavellan asks, almost squaring up before him.

“In my time here, I have told you nothing but the truth.”                                

She lets out a cold laugh, and doesn’t even bother to question his honesty. He’s almost certainly lied to her at least once in their current conversation. Instead, she says: “The truth can be weaponized.” She watches him like they’re on a battlefield. They are always on a battlefield.

“It can indeed.” Solas’s gaze meets Lavellan’s. The air between them is fraught, but with what she does not know. Solas is untouchable and enticing at once. Lavellan stands before him as a woman looking upon a lost lover who would kiss her upon her nose (a wretched, crooked thing that had been broken too many times to count) and call her beautiful with soft stars in his eyes and solemn sincerity in his voice. She stands as one who walks with gods, a hero-queen facing down an immortal enemy arisen from legend.

“So, where do we go from here?” Lavellan asks. She is running low on bravado and rage. “Even if we never speak again, we’re still stuck with one another. Maybe we’ll both just die when it gets to the tipping point. Perhaps it will be glorious.” It was a morbid thought, but the idea of both of her and her lover in the grave was strangely comforting, a solemn dénouement to their prolonged waltz toward destruction. There is an appealing grandiosity to it all, and she turns her gaze out over the shimmering nothingness again as if to break from some unearthly gravity that compels her towards her despised beloved.

Solas concurs with her thoughts: “Consignation to eternity to end our entwinement, and yet we would go together. Such would be a poetic tragedy unparalleled in its pathetic aptness.” He then says something terrible, a sentiment that disgusts Lavellan at the deepest level and triggers a familiar existential dread: “I have already said as much, but I would hope that the grasp of death could take me and me alone, regardless of which of us prevails. If I am to—to win, I suppose,“ his cadence falters, “it is my most sincere hope that you might make it through the trouble and find a home in the world that I create.” He wishes her well. She doesn’t want him to.

“You could’ve found a home in the world that I’m creating right now,” Lavellan spits out in response, swallowing her discomfort with his statement. Her chest aches, and in the Fade it echoes through all of her. She turns further away so that Solas cannot see her face. She plaintively offers, “You still could find a home, if you wanted one.”

When she looks to him again, Solas looks more tired than ever, and it makes Lavellan ache. “Even now, you extend to me—“

“Yes. It’s stupid of me, and you don’t deserve it. So don’t rub it in,” Lavellan says. She wants to ask him to go back to the physical world, for him to wake her up. She’s said all there is to say, and Solas is still a slimy, monstrous liar intent on destroying everything she ever knew. And there’s nothing she can do to fight him. Not now. Not until she returns to the plane of existence upon which she has resources and distance with which to play.

Instead of demanding to be returned to her crumpled and drunken form, likely still curled in a flowerbed, Lavellan pulls herself away from the railing and towards Solas. She makes contact, collapsing into him. Lavellan wants to tear him apart and cannot—now, she just wants to know that he is there in some capacity. Even though none of it is real, he seems solid enough, and she buries her face in the crook of his neck, her left hand resting on his collarbone and knotting in his clothing. She can almost pick up his scent, even in the Fade: parchment, fallen leaves and smoke. Lavellan is unsure of what she is doing. Perhaps she is giving in. Perhaps she is fighting still. 

Solas’s question is gentle and tentative. “Emma lath? May I touch you?” Lavellan murmurs a ‘yes’ into his shoulder, and he responds in a way that is anything other than gentle and tentative. Solas takes her by the jaw and pulls her into a desperately hungry kiss. His lips are soft, as soft as she remembers or perhaps even more so, but that does little to cushion the almost bruising caress. 

Lavellan returns the gesture, deepening the embrace when Solas opens his mouth to allow her tongue access. She was always the forward one, even if he had so enthusiastically followed her cue, as if he were so cautiously holding himself back until she had touched him first and given him some reason to act upon his passions, an excuse to take pleasure in her. Lavellan can feel the desperate want Solas harbors for her, and a part of her that she begrudgingly acquiesces to wants him, wants to strip the clothing from his body and lay with him skin to skin, bare bones and beating hearts barely separated in a tangle of limbs and loving. 

Lavellan holds Solas tight as he breaks from her for not even half a second before he recaptures her lower lip, sucking it between his teeth to be brought into a soft but firm bite. He gives half her jawline and the juncture of her neck the same treatment, and Lavellan arches into him as his mouth reaches her ear. She moans as she begins fiddling with his tunic, hurriedly trying to find some stretch of skin to feel, to claim for herself. This is happening and she wants it to happen. If there is nothing Lavellan can do to fight Solas and counter his insane designs, she will have him here in all of valiant hate and all of pathetic admiration.

Solas grasps Lavellan to him as her hand finds a stretch of his back and she rakes her fingernails along the small, her other hand squeezing slightly lower. He separates from her for another instant, his forehead still somehow pressed against hers, and Solas draws two pleasured breaths that echo through Lavellan's bones. Their entire bodies are flush against one another, and Lavellan can feel his arousal stirring as his own hands find their way into her clothing as their lips lock again. He tastes good to her. He’s always tasted good to her. His hand finds its way under the band of her brassiere, and Lavellan gasps into Solas's mouth as he pinches a nipple more roughly than expected.

Her clothes have been pulled upwards by his encroaching hands, and his garments have suffered a similar fate. Exposed stretches of their stomachs rest against one another, warm flesh upon warm flesh in cold air. It is too much for Lavellan. She has wanted this, wanted him for too long. 

It is too much for Solas as well. He pulls himself away but holds her close, his hands still under her clothing and clenched upon the soft curve of her bare waist. She feels him breathe, his body moving softly in time with hers. Even as he speaks, his lips grace her temples with chaste but needy kisses. They linger longer than they should. “I have wanted this again for so long, vhenan. But we should not do this.”

"Not here?” Lavellan asks breathlessly, as her own lips trail one of his perfect cheekbones. Disappointment wells within her words, a more honest relief rushing in the Fade’s resonation. In some world, all was right and she could hold him in her arms forever, but here she could not give herself over.

“Not anywhere, my love,” Solas answers sadly, and everything is subsumed by blackness.

 Lavellan gasps and sits up suddenly, grogginess and ache flooding her senses as she comes to in her physical form. She is not in the garden, she realizes, but instead in a pristine room that somehow had avoided sacrificing elegance for its structured simplicity. A shaft of the early morning’s near-scathing light falls across her face, and she reflexively tries to block the rays with her dominant hand. Her left arm, cut off just below the elbow, does little to impede her discomfort, and the arm of a white nightgown hangs limply from her stump.

Lavellan mentally reaffirms her hatred of the Fade.

She jumps suddenly, realizing that someone has undressed and redressed her. Lavellan’s right hand, which is wrapped in medicated bandages that have healed her cuts, clasps her chest, searching for the wolf’s bone necklace she had been gifted so long ago. It is gone, and she immediately checks her surroundings. She is flooded with relief when she finds it laying on the bedside table with her prosthesis and a pile of folded and laundered clothes, and she grasps for it. It does little to still her panic: other important affects have vanished.

“That’s his, huh?” a voice comes from across the room.

“Iron Bull,” Lavellan greets. The mercenary is sitting across the room on a pillowed bench that has clearly been dragged in from elsewhere, leaning back against the wall by a table where an oil lamp still burns. She looks at the book in his hand. “Hard in Hightown?” 

“Yeah, it was either this or Andrastean teen fiction,” the Iron Bull shrugs. “But you’re going to have to do better than that if you really want to pretend that you need reading glasses. Dorian filled me in about the letters and the weird optic dust stuff. Which Red has, by the way. She's got all your stuff for safekeeping."

“I could be farsighted,” suggests Lavellan with a sigh of relief. She sets the necklace in her lap to free her hand so she can rub her eyes. “How long have you been here?”

“Some sisters found you in the garden a few hours ago and had you brought in and cleaned up. I told Red I would keep an eye on you incase you started throwing up again.”

“I vomited?” asks Lavellan. She does not taste it in her mouth—at least she’s had water, then. Lavellan is embarrassed that Leliana had to get involved in the aftermath of her attempt at self-medication, especially in light of their argument. She begrudgingly realizes that she should thank the Divine.

“A lot, apparently. So, boss, what happened?”

“You know.”

“Yeah, but I want to hear it from you. It was your mess.” 

Lavellan hates talking about her wrongdoings. There’s no one else to push this problem off on. “I trusted Solas. It was a mistake.” She sighs, staring down at the twine-wrapped jawbone in her lap. “I know that he’s our enemy. My enemy. But we’d partnered before on mutual interests, and it had gone well. I don’t know if Dorian’s said anything over the crystals about the border conflict between Tevinter and Nevarra, but we wouldn’t have been able to defuse that as quickly without Solas’s information. When he fed me a list of Qunari spies, I didn’t think he’d be trying to use me to eliminate his own leaks.” She pauses, running a finger along the ossified contours of the necklace.

Bull lets out a long ‘mmmmmh’ before saying, “What happened is on you, but I wouldn’t blame you if you cut off all contact with Solas, even if you are using it to catch his spies.” He shakes his horned head, the corner of his rack tapping against the bookshelf slightly on one of his more powerful twists. “I never thought he’d be this big of an asshole. I mean, Solas could be a complete tool if you disagreed with him on something, but when I thought I was gonna go nuts because I’d been labeled Tal-Vashoth he…well, you had to save the world and Dorian was dealing with his own fucked-up stuff. You two definitely were there, but Solas really went out of his way to help me.” The big mercenary exhales slowly again, and resumes shaking his head. Lavellan realizes that to some degree, Bull is hurt too.

Lavellan doesn’t want to lie to her friends anymore. Not for Solas’s sake, and she doesn’t deserve her own protection either. “I talked with Solas while I was asleep. In the Fade, I mean.”

Bull cringes slightly. “He’s still doing that weird stuff and hanging out with demons? Agh, well, I guess it’s his thing.” The former Qunari pauses, and leans towards the bed on his bench. His voice drops a little, as if he is gathering secrets: “Did you guys bang in there?” 

Well, she could deny that without lying, but she wasn’t going to offer any more information: “No!” Lavellan can feel a blush spreading over her tattooed cheeks.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t even try to have hate sex! Come on, you might as well have gotten laid from all this crap that’s going on.” Lavellan must have turned a brighter red, because the Bull continues, “Ah-ha, you did try! Good on you, boss. But you didn’t go all the way. Let me guess: Second base?”

“What are you talking about?” Lavellan has no idea what that means, and she’s not sure if she wants to.

“Oh, it’s Qunari slang from this game that’s popular in Par Vollen,” Bull waves his hand. “It's like a metaphorical thing. You see, when you would go into the Tamassrans, sometimes you’re not really looking for intercourse, but—“ He stops with a laugh when he sees the way the Inquisitor is looking at him as she rubs her temples with the thumb and the little finger of her right hand. “Sorry boss, off-topic. Did he say anything to you?”

“Nothing new,” Lavellan says. “I don’t know what to do about any of this.” 

Though there was not exactly a question posed, Bull has an answer: “You’re gonna do better.” 

“How?”

“You’re gonna learn from this shit and not let it repeat itself,” Bull says.

Lavellan clenches her fist around the necklace. “So, what, I should stop writing him?” Even if she had allowed herself to kiss him, she never wanted to give Solas so much as the time of day ever again. “It’s the only way I have to track his agents. Judging from what he’s said, I don’t think he knows what we’ve been doing.” She pauses, and adds, “But, of course, he could be lying.”

“I got training to be part of the Ben-Hassrath, but when it got down to it, I had to learn a lot on the fly,” explains Bull, calm contemplation rumbling in his voice. “Confirm your information better. Examine things from perspectives you didn’t think of. Play the games you’ve got to play. So your boyfriend’s a liar.” Lavellan doesn’t bother to protest the appellation. “Whether you like it or not, so are you, boss.” It’s meant to be reassuring, and it sort of is. 

Lavellan nods. “Thank you, Bull. But I don’t know if he’ll ever write me again—he might have some sense of shame,” she bitterly stipulates. She hopes that her physical body had been profusely vomiting as she kissed Solas in the Fade. At least one aspect of her being had the right idea. Simultaneously as she conceptualizes her disgust, the memory forces Lavellan’s heart to flutter and makes her whole body buzz with an electric glow.

She decides she needs water, and turns to the far side of her bed to the pitcher and glass. Next to it, however, rests an unmarked envelope.

“Mother of fuck,” Lavellan groans, and she takes it in hand:

Inquisitor,

I would understand entirely if you never wished to speak again.

As deeply unfortunate as the circumstance that precipitated our meeting was, I did enjoy seeing you. Meeting in the Fade is as dangerous, if not more so, than meeting in person—you have my word that I will not come near to you there again. Despite this, I am selfish enough to ask you if you would wish to continue writing.

If the continuation of a correspondence is a thing that you can bear, I would appreciate your effort. You may lie forth the terms of any future relationship that we may have, within reason.  

Solas

Lavellan is entirely certain that this is the beginning of some new ploy by him and wants to laugh and throw the letter away. Such an action would be even more satisfying if his want for her words was genuine. But Lavellan has her own game, and she knows she must make herself to write to him lovingly and forgivingly. 

She knows that she can be convincing. It will, after all, be part true.

Chapter Text

Lavellan really should have known that ‘lovingly and forgivingly’ would be a stretch, but she does have a letter composed for Solas when she returns to Skyhold. She is in much better shape to insult him outside of his realm of dreams and away from any semblance of his stupid, intoxicating person:

Scumbag,

You’ve got some fucking gall. Give me one good reason why I should care what you would want or appreciate. Man’abelas! There isn’t one, you solipsistic jackass. I can’t even begin to enumerate ways I wish ill would manifest in your life. Suffice to say, I hope you fall down the fucking stairs.

With, perhaps, trace amounts of animosity,

Inquisitor Lavellan

She leaves the message on a counter in the kitchens, knowing that it will very quickly be found there before heading to the War Room to discuss the details of her mistake with Josephine and Cullen.

 Josephine and Cullen stare at Lavellan as she explains what had happened at the cathedral, their jaws slightly slack. Josephine has all but dropped her writing-board and quill on the table, but Cullen clenches the hilt of his sword as Lavellan continues: “So, much to Leliana’s understandable chagrin, I let the spy go free to deliver him a letter.” Lavellan wracks her mind for details that she might have forgotten, but only adds, “Oh, and then I drank until I blacked out.”

“You have been writing him this whole time? I know that you two were lovers, but…” Josephine shakes her head. “If you were not careful, you could have—“

“She wasn’t careful,” Cullen intercedes harshly, talking as if Lavellan wasn’t there, “and she ended up doing his bidding for him, and for what? Her romantic inclinations? We’re lucky that this was a small matter. If the Iron Bull hadn’t been there, it’s likely that the deception would have gone unnoticed.” The Commander turns to the Inquisitor. “He would’ve tried to use you again, maybe to strike at the Inquisition itself. And he would have succeeded.”

Lavellan had braced herself to take flack from her advisers, but something about Cullen’s words stings her still. “That's baseless speculation!”

“It’s my job to speculate about the liabilities that endanger my men!” Cullen counters. “I never thought you of all people would become one of those.” He looks down at his feet for a moment, and then abruptly walks for the door.

“Where are you going?” Lavellan demands. “We’re not done here.”

“Are you commanding me to remain, Inquisitor?” Cullen asks, his tone steeped with distaste.

Lavellan bubbles with rage, her shame and self-admonishment boiling into aggression towards her general. She opens her mouth to reify the order. Lavellan jumps when Josephine rests a hand on her shoulder. “Inquisitor, if I may. It might be best to let the Commander go for now. I will speak to him on your behalf,” Josephine says. Lavellan turns to look Josephine in the eyes, and with a heavy heart, the diplomat adds, “Once I make peace with it myself, that is.”

She is thirsty and drinks water after the meeting. Lavellan made several resolutions on her way back from Val Royeaux to Skyhold, and one of them was to never drink alcohol again, perhaps because she was hungover through most of her painful journey. She has many reasons to avoid imbibing, but wonders how long it will take for her to break her promise, especially in light of her frustration with herself.

On a table by her bedside, Lavellan finds a letter:

Inquisitor,

I am unsure of what you want me to say.

Solas

She groans loudly as she reads it. She doesn’t know what she wants him to say either.

Lavellan strongly considers not writing back. She also considers quitting her job and starting a quest to personally find and kill Solas, which would certainly make her feel much better.

Still too bitter to think of much else, Lavellan scrawls out a response on the same page that he left for her:

How about “For the rest of her time upon this plane of existence, I will serve Inquisitor Lavellan, mostly by helping her do the things that it takes two hands to do, like lacing certain pairs of boots and carrying certain objects. During that time, I won’t talk to her ever, because she hates me. Once she passes from this realm into the Void I will spend the rest of my unholy lifespan continuing to carry out her brilliant, inspired interests, as laid out in a legally binding contract that we will draft upon our next meeting. The terms of said contract will include details of how I will never threaten the integrity of any physical or magical structure that current society depends upon, including but not limited to walls, dams, public parks, and the fucking Veil itself”?

That might be a good start.

She changes out the envelope for good measure, and leaves it on her desk before she exits the room.

The next day begets a rapid exchange of less-than-pleasantries:

Inquisitor,

You could as well have not responded.

Solas

Same paper, same place, vanished less than an hour after it was placed:

I’m unsure of what you want me to say.

Slipped amidst her papers:

Do you mock me, Inquisitor?

Dropped inconspicuously from her pocket as she walked the yards with guests who wish to know her opinion on how to give the Chantry tithes:

You could as well have not responded.

Handed to Lavellan by a confused dwarven courier who did not remember when the letter was inserted into her bag:

Da’len,

Lavellan narrows her eyes.

You are infuriating sometimes. It would be quite kind of you to command me to never write to you again, or perhaps speak such sentiments with your silence. Yet you do not.

I erred in attempting to use you and your Inquisition. I should have anticipated that you would somehow catch me.

I suppose that comes off as a poor attempt at flattering you. Here lies my issue: whatever words I level at you seem to stem from a desire to manipulate you to my will. Even choice and control appear as if they are duplicitous gifts I offer to you in exchange for your affection and attention instead of attempts to cede the situation to your autonomy.

We, or perhaps I, have tied a terrible knot.

I do want what I want of you, my love, but I would not have it given under false or twisted pretenses. Not again. Please, tell me what you desire of me. I will not relent upon my designs, but if you wish, I will cease contact for your peace and comfort.

Solas

Lavellan sighs exasperatedly as she reads the letter. She really can’t believe that she kissed Solas instead of punching him the last time she saw him. Frustrated with herself and him, she writes her response:

Solas,

Stop acting like you made any mistake with the Carine incident other than sending agents who didn’t know how to clean up thoroughly to destroy the evidence connecting her to you. You personally couldn't have accounted for that. As low of a blow as it was, it was a smart maneuver—you played your ill-gotten cards well. It was my mistake, not yours.

You’re entirely right otherwise. Just as we cannot be rid of each other because of our war, we cannot be rid of our war when we speak. We can’t remove ourselves or our personal desires from the context of this conflict. You yourself taught me that lesson all too well. These letters are strategy and these words are tactics.

Maybe I haven’t learned well enough yet, though. So I’ve bitten: You told me a while ago that writing to me was your sole pleasure. I’m not sure if that wasn’t a lie to get me to engage with you, but for now I will relent and play pretend that you are sincere. Tell me what you want from my words, and maybe I’ll dance your dance a little longer.

I’m beginning to think that our relationship might be incredibly unhealthy,

Inquisitor Lavellan

Lavellan drops her pen and puts her forehead in her hand. She knows why she must write him, but has no excuse for the words that she sends his way. She has finally decided to tailor them to entrap and ensnare, to encourage him to write more, yet she is unsure of just how real they are.

It has been days since her last letter has vanished, and there is no response yet from Solas. She takes her anger out in the practice yard.

Lavellan parries her sparring partner’s blow with her left hand, and uses the opening to slice downwards with the training sword. She is rebuffed harshly by a kite-shield, and summarily disarmed as she is harshly flung to the ground by the next swish, her glasses tumbling from her face.

“Not bad, all things considered,” Thom Rainier says as he points his own wooden weapon at the fallen woman, who grabs for the displaced specs. They are undamaged, and she breathes a sign of relief. “But’d be too simple to take the hand off in an actual fight. It’s not hard to tell where all the straps are on it.”

“Maybe I could put some sort of guard on it? Like a small shield,” Lavellan suggests as Rainier offers her a hand up. He’s travelling to the south to the Frostback Basin where small tremors in the area may have opened new entrances to the Deep Roads. Reportedly, no darkspawn have been spotted, but it is a Warden’s duty to be safe rather than sorry.

“You’d have to ask Harritt. I’d reckon he’d have some ideas,” the now-actual-Warden offers as he pulls Lavellan to her feet. There is much more grey in his beard than what Lavellan recalls, and while Rainier seems robust, the Inquisitor wonders what toll his new burdens of the Taint and fighting darkspawn have taken on him.

“Yes, and Dagna would have the thing shooting fire,” Lavellan says. Before she bows to pick up her sword, she reaches to massage her left shoulder. “Ow, did you have to hit so hard?”

“You’re out of practice,” Rainier says. “I’d say you’ve gone soft.”

Lavellan scrunches her nose. She does not like to be reminded that she is likely not half the warrior she was before. “Not all of us get to hack up darkspawn all day, Thom.” She’s known him as Rainier now longer than she ever knew him as Blackwall, but it’s still weird to say.

“And I may be hitting hard because I have some bottled anger towards you,” Rainier says. Lavellan turns to him, blinking as she crouches near the practice weapon. She is concerned for what he might say. The bearded man continues, “I was working in the Vimmarks and stopped in Kirkwall recently, and Varric may have shown me a certain napkin…”

“So he does still have it!” Lavellan leaps to her feet and exclaims before she can pretend to have no idea about what Rainier was talking about. “I mean…Varric and I never wrote the set-up for an erotic stage performance featuring you and my at-the-time boyfriend. That would be creepy and weird.”

“It was creepy and weird!” asserts Rainier. “Anyways, speaking of Solas, I heard about what happened in Val Royeaux from Josephine.”

“You two talked?” Lavellan asks as the two tread out of the practice yards and walk toward the stairs to the ramparts. “It wasn’t—“

“Awkward? No, not really,” responds Rainier, referring to the romance that never quite bloomed. “But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about you.”

Lavellan owes accountability to her friends, but she is getting frustrated with vocalizing her mistakes. She has already written to Sera about the issue, and Varric and Cassandra already somehow know. She doesn’t doubt that Cole knows what happened somehow, and apparently Bull had filled Dorian in over the crystals while she was unconscious. Vivienne probably has somehow gotten wind of it already, too, but Lavellan is spending time drafting her personal confession to the mage. As far as Lavellan knows, everyone is upset with her. She doesn’t really blame them. “Listen, if you want it explained, you can ask Josephine or Cullen, I don’t—“

“You’re not getting it,” Rainier almost laughs, cutting her off again. “I know what happened, Lavellan. You went and fucked up. I fucked up worse than you ever did years ago, so you won't hear more any more scolding from me. How’re you holding up?”

“I keep on thinking of all the ‘could haves,’” Lavellan admits. “If Bull hadn’t decided to move a fucking desk, I might have gone on trusting Solas’s information. And Cullen was right—eventually, I could have gotten our men killed for my folly.” Lavellan shakes her head. “We’re considering tipping the Qun off about the fact that Solas knew about Mother Carine.”

“And what would that accomplish?” Rainier asks. “I’m not saying don’t do it, by the way. I’m genuinely curious.”

“Oh, it’s entirely out of spite,” laughs Lavellan, and the Warden looks at her disapprovingly. She sighs, understanding the source of his consternation. “I know, I know, Thom.”

“To do it, you’ve got to have a better reason for it than that.”

“Oh, trust me,” Lavellan says. “The more I think about it, the messier it gets. I would love it if I could waste Solas’s time and resources, and it would be a good move to distract my enemies by heightening their battles against one another. But there are benefits to keeping quiet, too. If we don’t tip off the Qun, Solas stays in a stronger position against them. He sounds like he’s planning something big—maybe it’s all talk, or maybe it’s something that can cripple their operations. This could be useful, especially if we wanted to make this into a one-front war. Qunari pose a much greater immediate military threat. They are, after all, in open war on the Tevinter borders right now. Not that I necessarily mind Tevinter paying attention to them instead of using their military for expansionism, which would open a second front again and fuck up our operations in the Imperium.” Lavellan doesn’t mention aloud to Rainier that the Inquisition is making money off of the conflict between Tevinter and the Qun—for some reason, she doesn’t feel like what essentially amounts to war profiteering will go over well with the remorseful ex-criminal. “But, there’s also benefits of telling them. Solas’s endgame is worse than the Qun’s, probably, and we could strengthen their fight against him, and also perhaps engender some goodwill."

“Fat chance with the Qun,” Rainier says, “I mean, from what I know.”

“No, you’re right,” agrees Lavellan. An elven soldier walks by, and Lavellan peers at him, bowing her head as he walks past and gives her a solemn ‘Inquisitor.’ She continues, “And, as I mentioned, there’s a chance that if they turn to fight each other more, they’ll use their time and resources on one another in a greater capacity. The Qun likely still has spies in Solas’s network—the Viddathari elves could potentially do a lot of harm to him, and we would weaken his position against us, and potentially the Qun’s if there’s collateral damage. Or,” Lavellan admits, “more likely, whatever we do with the information won’t matter because Solas and the Qun actually aren’t in good enough positions to effectively fight one another. Or the balance is different than we thought and we get a different outcome all together. Or, the Qun could already know. They’re spying on us too, after all. That being said, most Viddathari Hissrad are so much easier to weed out than spies of Fen’Harel because their information pathways are simpler to identify. So, er, I sort of wish I could just decide to tell the Qun about it out of spite and malice.”

“Maker,” Rainier grumbles, “I’m sometimes glad I’ve never had a post where I had to worry about strategy. I’ll talk your ear off on tactics any day, but all the big games? Wouldn’t touch them for the world.”

“I can’t say I don’t enjoy a challenge,” Lavellan admits. The two have made it to the ramparts, and walk along the top in the late midday sun. “Until I remember that lives are on the line. I’m playing with the worst stakes in the world. And trying to do what’s right for Thedas is difficult when I feel like there’s literally no good option, or like I can’t plan ahead far enough to create one for myself.”

“If you’ve got anything going for you,” Rainier says, “it’s your ability to look at the impossible and put on a good face. It's what makes you so inspiring. I know what I’ve seen, and I think I’ve reason to believe you’ll succeed.” He sighs and shakes his head. “I’m still amazed after all this time about Solas.”

“Tell me about it. Can we bring back Corypheus and fight him instead? At least me and him haven’t seen each other naked. Or maybe we all might have seen Corypheus naked? Do you think that his get-up was just, you know, part of him? Because then he wouldn’t actually be wearing clothes, even if it looked like a robe. How do these things even work?” Rainier thinks for a moment and then laughs, and it feels nice to be in someone’s good graces.

A thought hits Lavellan, and she is silent for a moment. “After we figured out about you—who you really were—Solas was especially harsh on you. He was irate that I allowed you to come back to our travelling party at first.” Lavellan could not find it within herself to not give Rainier a second chance. She would’ve died in battle many times over if he had not been watching her back. She had all but owed him a chance at forgiveness for his past misdeeds. Bitterly, Lavellan adds, “Solas is really the last person who should ever have a problem with someone lying.”

“But it wasn’t the lie that really got him,” Rainier says abruptly. “Not fully, no.”

Lavellan cocks a brow. She is surprised by the statement. “What do you mean?”

Rainier gives a rough half-chuckle. “I’ve thought of this some. You’ve got a lot of free time in camp in the Deep Roads to ruminate on things past. When Solas looked at Warden-Constable Gordon Blackwall, I think he saw what he wanted to be, or rather what he wanted to believe himself to be. Though your man didn’t care a fig for the Wardens, he thought that Blackwall was someone who had seen war and loss and sacrificed everything to defend people to the best of his ability.” The man who speaks of himself pauses for a moment, turning to Lavellan as the two walk on the ramparts. “And Captain Thom Rainier—Well, Thom Rainier was a jaded man who let his arrogance and selfishness lead him to do something terrible and unnecessary. Then other people had to suffer for his actions while he went and slipped away into hiding like a yellowbellied coward. Maybe I didn’t go to sleep for scores of ages, but I sure skipped out on a lot of my consequences by dropping off the map.”

Lavellan remembers that Rainier has always been more insightful than people give him credit for. His sharp eyes and deliberate actions on the field of battle certainly belied a quick mind mired behind the coarseness of a tangled beard and a crude lack of social grace. “That actually makes a lot of sense.” She wants to think more of consequences, but offers another thought: “He told me that every other option was worse than constructing the Veil.”

“Well, I don’t know if there’s anything to it.” Rainier says. “But it’s what I think. In my view, Solas’s only comfort is that what he did to all those elves was completely and totally necessary. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t think so. I’d bet that he thinks what he’s doing now is necessary too. Otherwise I don’t think he’d be going about it.”

Bruises forming on her arms from the earlier spar, Lavellan waves Rainier goodbye at the tavern door. He is merrily buzzed and sits with an arm around one of the quartermaster’s runners, a 40-something war-widow who had been chatting him up since early in the evening. Lavellan had not touched a drop of alcohol.

She climbs up the stairs into the castle and then to her room, noticing the pile of mail that rests in the box at the door. She peers through them, hoping that Sera has written to her in response. Part of Lavellan hopes that Sera never even got her letter—something angry would be preferable to nothing. Lavellan also remembers that she still has to write to Vivienne. No more lying or hiding, she had resolved, not from her friends.

There is, however, a new letter obviously from Solas at the foot of her bed. It is unmarked, and the unfortunately clear-headed Lavellan resigns herself to reading it. She knows there’s trouble when it begins with her given name:

Adahlen,

You ask to know, vhenan, what I wish of you.

And in response, I shall request from you nothing less than all of everything.

This has not changed since the first moment we met in earnest upon the mountainside in Haven, both of us fresh, relatively speaking, from unshaking slumbers. Time and time again I have sought as much from you, and I’ve since discovered you to be uniquely up to the task of bestowing it upon me.

Solas

Chapter Text

“Fuck you, Solas,” Lavellan says in what is now a sort of bitter mantra as she looks at the letter she holds in her hand. She drops it and collapses backwards onto her bed to stare at the high vaulted ceiling with a frown on her face.

Though she no longer looks at the paper, she cannot help but reflect upon its contents. What did he even mean by ‘all of everything?’ It was either incredibly specific or incredibly vague.

Lavellan doesn’t want to think about it, but, prompted partially by her particular choice of obscenity, she remembers that she and Solas had first had sex essentially in the spot where she was laying. She’d pulled him inside from the balcony where they had affirmed their mutual attraction and respect and ushered him towards the bed with an inviting laugh to mask her anxiety. She’d never really been one to wait, and he had so eagerly jumped at her urging.

Despite no lack of previous sexual experience, Lavellan had been so nervous, blushing and trying hard to restrain her wavering. Somehow, the fact that he was significantly older than her had made her embarrassment over her lack of composure worse. She’d faced down a so-called god atop a burning mountain with far more courage than she could muster for a bald, middle-aged apostate standing before her in his smalls. Lavellan had not quite known how to approach Solas. There was no one in the world quite like him, she had known even then, and felt half-crazed for being so enraptured.

Lavellan can’t help but warm slightly between her legs as she thinks back. Any reservations she had had about sexual contact with such a singular man had dissolved as they engaged in earnest—she had very quickly discovered that their inclinations were delightfully compatible. Lavellan deliberately chooses to wrench her mind away from that particular set of recollections. Even if he would never know of it, she is determined to not give Solas the satisfaction of actually being the subject of her masturbatory fantasies.

Despite her determination to not focus on such matters, Lavellan cannot help but remember that Solas would often cover his face when she would wrest lead of their activities from him and send him gasping in elvish over the brink of his own control. At the time Lavellan had considered the small action of her lover throwing a hand or forearm up to obscure his contorted visage to be a strange and somewhat endearing physical tic. Now, Solas’s old compulsion of shielding himself from her during moments of intimate vulnerability seems simultaneously sadder and more sinister. 

Lavellan lets out an irritable groan and sits up. She supposes that she can write to Solas before she turns in for the night, especially because she does not have all that much to say to him. 

Her mind secured in the gutter, she begins mentally composing something tremendously lewd, starting with Nothing less than all of everything, you say? Is that a sex thing?, but she decides against putting that to paper. Using crassness as a mechanism by which to hide her emotional turmoil is old hat at this point. Instead, the offer enclosed to him is strangely tender:

Solas,

Halani-ma, you don’t like to settle on the small things, do you?

I’d like you to elaborate on what you mean by “everything.” You’re lucky that you’ve got such a pretty face: I feel compelled by it to at least listen to your request in full.  

Under the assumption that you speak with sincerity, I have a feeling that the next letter might be difficult. Take your time.

Certainly wishing some things upon you,

Inquisitor Lavellan

She prepares the letter for its disappearance, and takes it to the foot of the stairs before locking the door behind her. Lavellan goes back to bed and thinks of nothing more than sleeping in Solas’s arms.

The response to her letter to Solas comes in three days later with the regular mail, but she doesn’t have the emotional energy to read it before her meeting with her still-irate advisers.

Lavellan sifts through the pile to see if Sera or Vivienne had sent her anything. Of all her inner circle, they were the most dissimilar in every aspect but one: their ability to hold grudges. There is nothing from the Dearest Friend of Red Jenny, who Lavellan is certain hates her now, but the First Enchanter has indeed sent her a letter. Lavellan sees that it’s postmarked through Halamshiral, far from where she knows the mage to be. After three pages of snide admonishment from Vivienne, there is a caveat requesting a meeting in the near future. Business with her new Circle, mages and templars and what will have her, Madame du Fer says.

Lavellan slips Solas’s letter, which is thick and heavy in its envelope, into her vest before hurriedly heading down to the War Room. Josephine has already retreated to the enclave for the meeting, and instead a very enthusiastic Dagna waits in the lounge area. “You ready, Inquisitor?” the dwarf giggles. “I’m ready!”

“Maybe you could seem a little more chipper,” Lavellan suggests. She too is buzzing with anticipation. “Maybe if your body can’t contain it, it will spread to the rest of the room and Cullen will catch some of it.” Josephine, in part, has been willing to at least act as if she has moved past Lavellan’s blunder. Cullen still will not even look at her when he passes her on the ramparts or in the Grand Hall. Lavellan is not looking forward to being in a room with the Commander, but she will not let him see any trepidation.

Cullen is at least willing to speak with the arcanist when the two enter the room through the small door carved out of the grand entrance. “Arcanist Dagna? Why are you here?”

“Hi Commander! Hi Lady Josephine!” Josephine curtseys in response to the little woman’s exuberant greeting. “The Inquisitor and me and Dorian have a secret! Right?”

“Did you say Dorian?” Josephine asks. She peers at the door as if she is expecting the Tevinter to waltz in from halfway across the continent.

“Then let us hope that it is a good secret this time,” Cullen says, staring at Lavellan with a brow cocked and a frown upon his face.

Despite her uneasiness about the attitudes of her advisors, Lavellan cracks a broad grin as she faces her unhappy militarist. “Oh, Commander, believe me. It’s a fantastic secret. And yes, she did say ‘Dorian.’ Let’s activate the silencing rune and call him in.” 

“Oh dust is this exciting!” Dagna spills a host of magical baubles onto the table, many of which spark and glow. Cullen shifts, noticeably uneasy at the arcane development. “I haven’t even tested to see if the transistor access aperture works, but it should…” she mumbles to herself as she pokes at a series of crystals and talismans that are strewn across the desk. With her fiddling, the room flashes blue and then red, and when the lights clear, a translucent, flickering figure of Dorian Pavus stands alongside the four.

“Oh, you’ve improved the imaging quality! I can make out all of your faces this time. But see?” the handsome magister, who is dressed stylishly and sports an immaculately trimmed beard, says to Dagna. The tiny dwarf has clearly developed some new magical marvel. “I told you it would work inside the sound barrier if you just calculated the trajectory of the Enriconius Point and considered the movement. Note for next time: I’m always right.”

“I told you I thought it was a good idea and theoretically sound, I just thought that there would be more Veil disru—" 

“Dagna, Dorian! Focus,” Lavellan warns.

Dorian laughs and crosses his arms. “Oh, I will. To pleasantries, then to business which will immediately fall into utter shenanigans, and then petty bickering and outright hostility! It’ll be just like the magisterium, only less people will be dead by the end of the evening and there probably won’t be any orgies. That being said, It’s quite a pleasure to see everyone here. Not as much of a pleasure as it is to see me, of course.” He cracks a broad grin.

Cullen extends a standard greeting. “You’re looking well, Dorian.”

“Watch yourself, Commander. I’m now in a committed relationship,” Dorian says as Cullen suppresses an exasperated groan in response. “You had your chance.”

“It is indeed a pleasure to see you, Dorian. There is some surprise?” Josephine asks, titling her head slightly. Her dark eyes narrow with anticipation. “Is it relevant to Tevinter’s conflict with the Qun? Or whispers of something dark and dangerous in the cloak room of the Imperial Senate, perhaps?”

Dorian starts, “Oh, when there are dark and dangerous forces in the cloak room we usually don’t bother with whispers and just scream in terror. Especially that thing last week—“ He shudders. 

“Actually,” Lavellan says, speaking before Dorian can continue, “it’s about Solas. Over the past few months, the three of us have been working to track the agents of Fen’Harel within Skyhold. We might be missing some sleepers, but we have a fairly good idea of the active ones who go about his bidding on a daily basis.” Careful not to dislodge Solas’s personal letter to her, Lavellan unbuttons her blouse (she has become adept at doing so with one hand) and reaches inside her shirt and brassiere to retrieve a small stack of folded papers. She hands the papers to Cullen, and Josephine peers at them as he opens it. “For your reading pleasure.”

The Commander blinks incredulously. “Maker’s Breath…this is maybe a sixth of our elven personnel. That’s not an insubstantial number. How did you get this information?” he asks, looking at Lavellan skeptically before saying to Josephine, “Do you think we can trust it?”

A very sour Lavellan bites back the urge to respond caustically and instead offers the floor to her two coconspirators. “Dorian. Dagna. Explain what we’ve been doing.”

“So,” Dorian begins, “You know how it is in Imperial industrial areas. Actually, no, you don’t, probably. Suffice to say that they’re big and magic-fueled and every third warehouse houses the pet project of some magister or another trying to make their name. About another third of those projects involve trying to replicate gaatlock to supply our soporati infantrymen with things that go boom and even matters out with the Qun. Then, of course, if anyone gets anywhere close, some Ben-Hassrath Tallis will sneak in, snuff the project coordinator, and then bring real gaatlock and blow the place sky-high. Still, people try endlessly. And while no gaatlock is ever made, sometimes happy little accidents produce otherwise useful alchemical compounds that help magisters win prestige and influence. So literally everything that comes out of these laboratories is, by habit, subjected to a stringent battery of tests by its creators to determine any possible purpose." 

“Forgive me, but I am not sure that I understand,” Josephine says. “I thought magisters won prestige through magical feats. Alchemy isn’t magic.”

“No.” Cullen crosses his arms, his armor clinking slightly. “It’s not, but a considerable amount of magic is done or facilitated by energizing or activating inert or imbued compounds. Certain composites hold mana charges better, and there’s a laundry list of alchemical ways one can manipulate raw lyrium to suit one’s needs.”

Dagna nods enthusiastically. “You know a lot about this, Commander! It’s almost like you heard a lecture from—“

“First Enchanter Irving?” Cullen finishes for her with a small roll of his eyes. “I was a templar. You’ve no idea how many times I had to supervise his alchemical safety lecture just by the time I was nineteen.” 

“Right. Moving on, a good friend mine in the magisterium was doing an old Circle acquaintance a favor by financing his small laboratory where he was attempting to produce—wait for it—gaatlock. It didn’t work, of course. But it turned out something very close to stealth dust. The stuff Sera or Varric might use in combat, you know? Except when activated, either by magic or a primer,” Dagna holds up a bent metal wand with a glowing blue lobe at the end and indicates at it to the room, “the dust is the only thing that vanishes, as opposed to the dust and what it's coating. Useless, right? Well, while checking to see if it was emitting any harmful magic—literally, unstable compounds are at the heart of so much of the ‘curse’ nonsense you all go on about in the South—my friend noticed an odd light signal that’s almost impossible to detect, except when filtered through very, very specific optic mediums.”

“This is where I came in!” Dagna interrupts. “Dorian’s friend immediately went to him because he thought the dust could be useful for espionage and tracking and wanted to see if the Inquisition could use it before bringing it to the attention of the Imperium. Dorian talked to the Inquisitor, and she talked to me about recreating it and got the two of us set up over transistors so we could work together! It was pretty easy to make without anyone noticing since I could skim almost all of the components off of the materials for Harritt’s weapons shipments. I had to fix two things: One was to make it so that whoever was marked wouldn’t track it all over, and the other was discrete way to notice the signal. For the first problem, I just had to fiddle with the alchemical composition—I also got it to light up in different colors so we could see who was touching what. For the second, Dorian suggested glasses with the filters for lens.”

Lavellan draws her reading glasses from a pocket, and offers them to Josephine. “But there isn’t any of the…” the Antivan woman starts, even as she nears the frames to her face. She jumps at an observation. “Green? On my hands?”

“You said someone was leaking information from your private financial ledgers. I’ve been putting the optic dust on the pages, so of course some rubbed off on you. Turns out it’s the fellow who brings wood for your hearth,” the Inquisitor explains.

“He was a suspect, among many others… He was always so pleasant…” Josephine shakes her head sadly. “Oh! Commander! Your hands are blue! And orange!”

“I assume you also seeded the fake charts,” Cullen realizes, peering down at the glove he can see nothing on. “And the real ones! Of course, you can see if anyone has breached a supposedly secure space! Ah, has anyone…?”

“I haven't seen anyone that's been in the real charts, no,” Lavellan answers. “That’s the orange.”

“But what is that red on you, Inquisitor?” Josephine asks before handing the glasses off to Cullen.

It’s a little weird and painful to say aloud: “My letters to Solas. I won’t lie to you and say that I haven’t been…sentimental in my correspondence, but I have had an ulterior motive for speaking to him.” He may have been right when he had called her a hypocrite, Lavellan thinks. She doesn’t particularly care. “Over the spring and summer, I exchanged hundreds of letters with Solas. Sometimes ten a day, or more. I would leave them in all manners of places to try and give a variety of operatives a chance to take them. I started making the list that way. The dust dissolves away after two days, so I would test people again and again to make sure that it wasn’t by some accident that they happened upon an envelope—everyone on that list is almost certainly a spy.”

“And Solas doesn’t know about the compound? Even in our short interactions in his time with the Inquisition, I understood him to have an enormous wealth of arcane knowledge,” Cullen says. He had always been wary of the mages of the Inquisition, the strange apostate who spoke of congress with demons moreso than even the Tevinter. “If he was aware, would be simple to create false positives, or perhaps find a way to remove it from his people.”

Said Tevinter intercedes, “I don’t believe he would know, no. From what I’ve heard from the Inquisitor here, espionage relied mostly on leveraging spirits in the time of the ancient elves, and as far as I am aware, we’re unprecedented. No one’s ever used botched attempts at making gaatlock for anything like this. I’ve also reason to believe that Solas’s network has very little presence here in the Imperium. I’m certain there’s a constituency among the slaves, but their movements and means of access to information are very limited.”

Lavellan adds, “As of last week,” from a single sentence he said in the Fade, but Lavellan wouldn’t admit that unless she had to, ”Solas indicated to me that he believes I’m only watching drop points. Solas could be lying to me, as he is wont to do, but we have no reason to believe that he’s on to us.”

The diplomat frowns slightly. “Why have you kept this a secret from us? It is impressive work, but—”

“The less people that knew, the less conversations were to be had about it,” Lavellan explains. She is clearing the air now, happy to let Josephine and Cullen know of everything. No more lying to friends. Perhaps she could not be better than Solas to him, but she could be better to others. “Plus, I didn’t know how successful the plan would be." 

Josephine nods in understanding. “So what do we do with this information now?” she asks. “Move to detain these people? That could cause a stir, both among our ranks and in public relations… I can’t see the elves of Thedas being pleased with the move, unless we want to take our war with Fen’Harel public—which could be equally disastrous among your people, Inquisitor.”

“I believe that would be a bad idea, too. I was thinking we could watch them to find information passageways?” Lavellan suggests. She has ideas, but is unsure of their feasibility. She knows she will explore her options with the advisors in the coming days and weeks. “We’ll have to find trustworthy and stealthy agents, but we can locate further operatives and eluvians using these people as leads.” Lavellan is getting tired of the exhaustive secrecy. For months she’s been keeping lists and notes and vials of powder in her smalls and brasserie at all times. She’d nearly had a heart attack when she’d learned that the sisters at the cathedral had undressed her after she vomited on herself—to her relief, Leliana herself had thought to search her person and temporarily confiscate everything on her.

Still, most of the time the integrity and privacy of her own person is the only thing she can be entirely sure of. Lavellan considers there to be a certain irony to the fact that the only places she can hide things from her former intimate partner are adjacent to her erogenous zones.

“Speaking of eluvians, is there any news on The ‘Ser M’ Operation, Commander?” Josephine asks Cullen.

The Commander, however, is busy speaking to Dorian. “No, really?”

“Of course I’m trying to start a beard trend in the magisterium on purpose,” Dorian says. Sighing wistfully, he adds, “I do hope it comes in all patchy for the ones who hate me.”

“Ugh...well, I’ve actually considered growing one myself. But I’m worried it’ll look—“

“Flesh-colored?” Dorian’s image amusedly ventures as he strokes his own beard. “Yes, facial hair is so…precarious for blondes.”

Almost irritably, Josephine asserts, “Excuse me, gentlemen, but we have business to speak of. So if you would very kindly stop talking about your hair—”

Dagna stops Lavellan as she follows the Commander and the Ambassador out from the War Room. “Inquisitor! I almost forgot. Sera sent me a letter to give to you, but it’s sort of covered in dead bees so it’s really gross and I didn’t want to give it to you like that. I told her not to put them in that box… So I’ll just say what it says. Sera doesn’t care that ‘some holier-than-you-and-you-and-you lady-priest got sacked,’ just as long as you ‘don’t muck it up on something big and real trying to make it so your thing can do things with Solas’s thing,’ and all that matters is that ‘we get him back and shove it in his other thing.’ What she means to say is—”

“I understand,” Lavellan says with a smile. She is genuinely excited for what comes next and how she will use her painstakingly gathered information. “Loud and clear.” 

Dagna bids the Inquisitor farewell and wanders off back to the undercroft, and Lavellan’s smile fades. She’d get Solas back with a vengeance, but she knows it will not be so clean. Lavellan still has a letter to read, and knows that it will likely be hard on her.

 Lavellan finds herself in Skyhold's rotunda.

It hasn’t changed since Solas left. Before he had revealed himself as an enemy of the Inquisition, the room had merely fallen into disuse. It was an empty chamber off to the side, a landing for a more interesting tower filled with books and birds. Since then, however, many in the know had conspicuously avoided the room and its looming mural. A few crates and decorations for other seasons had been stashed around the chaise, but the floor of the room hadn’t even taken off as a storage space and largely lay fallow.

Lavellan sits down at Solas’s desk, which is still piled with books he had requisitioned for study so long ago. Even after nearly four years, no one has moved them. One catches her eye: A Compendium of Discredited Theories About the Veil. She flips it open, remembering that the title page and half of the introduction had been ripped out for some reason. There was a little blood on a few other pages, too—many tomes that had once had homes in Thedas’s Cirlces were in such sorry states. She remembered the details of this one’s damages fairly well, as she had bought it for Solas. 

Under a header that reads “Discredited Theory No. 1: First Enchanter Hugene Raymonte of Montissimard’s ‘Veil Cube,’” a note is scribbled: 

Solas,

A merchant had this book and I bought it because it reminded me of you. I think it was liberated from some Circle or another when the things fell. Since you know so much about the Veil from your own studies, I thought you might be entertained by reading about some of academia’s missteps.

Hope you like it!

xo, Adahlen

Lavellan was certain that nowhere in the book did anyone posit that a single infuriating elven man with divine cheekbones and an incurable compulsion to cause apocalypses had constructed the Veil. She supposed that the contents were, after all, debunked theories.

Solas had claimed to have been not only amused by the wrongness of the book’s contents, but also said that it enlightened him as to prevailing schools of Circle thought throughout the ages. He always did like esoteric and completely useless knowledge. He’d even explained a little of it to her as the two of them walked the garden together one day.

Lavellan had been utterly infuriated that day about some issue with nobles and had taken his offer to allow her to talk it through with him—forty-five minutes of venting and getting worked up about inane political intricacies built from century-old precedents of stupidity and pettiness, and Solas had managed to diffuse all of her irritation by telling her he’d thought she’d contextualized the issue impressively and that, by the way, he’d very much liked the book she’d bought him.

But, Lavellan thought bitterly, he hadn’t liked the book enough to take it with him when he vanished. 

Perhaps it wasn’t a good enough gift for Solas. It certainly was rather paltry when compared to ‘absolutely everything.’ Lavellan sets the tome down, leans back in the chair, and opens his letter:

Inquisitor,

No, I suppose I do not settle for unhappy half-satisfactions. And neither do you, so I shall attempt to be as thorough as I can in my explanation of my request in my prior letter. I consider myself fortunate that you remember my features so fondly.

When I first laid my eyes upon you, you were unconscious. Prone slack on the floor of a Chantry cell, you were hopeless and helpless, heaped at the doorway of death. Cassandra had asked me my name and purpose when I offered my services, and I rendered the Seeker two truths more duplicitous than I desired them to be: I was called Solas, and I wished to help.

What might have been all of the swords in the world were pointed at the two of us as I tended to you, preserving what life was left in your body while appraising what had become of my foci. Neither prognosis looked particularly good. Already, though, you were a mystery: Who were you? What had you been doing at the Conclave, and how did you happen upon the orb I had so foolishly ceded to Corypheus? How had you survived to that point? And what would be your fate? I already had a feeling that your destiny was linked to my own, though my prediction was undoubtedly morbid: you would perish ignominiously on the stone floor, and I would be taken in the darkness soon to subsume the world.

I have told you before that I felt the whole world change upon our true meeting. That was as true now as it was then. I first touched you to hold your hand to the rift, and watched then a full future to the world be bestowed there in the snow. Armed with a power you could not possibly understand, only you could defend existence itself from being torn to shreds by a lunatic’s fumbling, and for all of Elvhenan, I needed you to deliver me the universe. There my tendency to ask everything of you was born.

I lived a false life in a world I saw as falser still, alienated and adrift alone with only memories and wisps in the Fade to contextualize my being. In truth, I had begun to lose myself much before my long sleep. For centuries or more before the fall of Elvhenan, I had been deemed a villain for my rebellion and called a scheming madman who wished to see the world burn. Allies and enemies alike saddled me with the name of an animal and reduced me to an accursed thing to speak only of in whispers, a shadow to either fear or follow. I suppose I fulfilled the prophecy of my bestial title: even in my grief and rage over the murder of Mythal, I do not think I could have deigned to design the Veil if my very self had not been so eroded.

Do not think I had a crisis of identity. I have never been unsure of what I am. Merely my awareness had become more of a curse than a blessing. When I walked amongst those of the Inquisition, I was a joyless but analgesic liar, one whose entirety was predicated on dedication to a reprehensible but not entirely regrettable duty. It might have been easier to live that way, vhenan, but you had the audacity to love me and cause me to love you back.

It pains me to admit that I did not immediately see you as beautiful in the Chantry cell or even in the ominous light of the mountaintop. How could I? You appeared plain and crooked-nosed, ailing at the brink of destruction. I was grievously and shamefully wrong in my initial appraisal: crooked nose and all, you are the most challenging, contradictory, beautiful thing I have ever laid my unworthy eyes and hands upon. I exalt and rue the day you kissed me, offering yourself to me so enticingly that I could not help but partake in the monstrous and mortal sin of loving and lying at once.

Yet what I felt—and what I feel, no matter how corrupted our situation now is— was more genuine than I can convey with words. You, you strange and confusing being, bid reactions from me that arose from the center of who I am, far beneath whatever mask I may have worn before you.

I did not quite know how to approach you the first time we laid together. I was anxious, fearful of debasing something so bright and beautiful with my deception even as you beckoned me unto you. But I was not so veiled at all as we touched: There were moments (more than mere moments, in honesty) when I could slip past my lies and the lines on your face. I could be present as myself, there in the same capacity as you as we embraced. I thought to lose myself in you. In less coherent thoughts, I wished to affix myself so close to the core of your being that I could see the seams where your honest bravery met your affected bravado and weave myself there into the fabric of your exhilarated trepidation, our beating hearts threaded tight together.

Despite the physical sensations associated, such emotional entanglement was not entirely pleasurable. Part of me wished to hide even such a small aspect of my truth away from you. I feared that you would somehow see me as a monster right then and there, that you would know me as a liar when the last of my composure and control ebbed away and I was laid vulnerable before you.

Such a thing did not materialize. In the quiet, near-still moments when we laid pressed to one another, whole to whole and heart to heart, I could regard myself merely a man—one who loved a woman for what she was, and was loved by that woman in kind—before pangs of guilt and shame would eke in and tear what I had mended asunder.

It was not just sexual contact that spurred such moments of reductive peace. The time I spent near an hour trying to magically put your two front teeth back into your mouth exactly as they had been after they were knocked loose in battle, strangely, forged one of my fonder memories.

You asked me if my feet were cold when I walked in the snow, and bought me books you thought would draw amusement from me. I lulled you to sleep when you could not rest with the weight of the world upon your shoulders. I spoke and you listened, and I paid you back in ever-rapt kind. I wanted it. I most genuinely wanted all of it. Our small intimacies were much truer to me than anything outside the Fade had been even for seeming eons before I consigned myself to slumber.

Perhaps still my silence spoke lies to you, but I was as honest as I could be. I know that means very little in the face of everything else I have said and done. To my knowledge, you have never kissed me or held me as the Inquisitor, only as Adahlen. And as such, I have been Solas and only Solas in your arms, attaining a lucid veracity I could know nowhere else upon this plane. Thus you did render unto me nothing less than myself.

Eventually I will detach myself from you (you, your words, and your very idea) when I must become once more not a man but a creature of death. Until then, you are what keeps me whole.

M'abelas, Inquisitor, but I cannot write any more now. I am a busy man, my love, and, as you surmised, laying myself truly bare before you is not a simple task. I hope you begin to see what I meant by ‘everything.’

Solas

Lavellan closes her eyes and chokes something back. She doesn't want it to be tears. She wonders if Solas is trying to drive her insane, if his master plan involves breaking her down and making her ache inside until she can take no more. Part of her hopes he is playing some twisted game with her. Warfare, at least, would be an excuse.

He sounds sick, obsessive almost. Had his thoughts always been in such a state? Had he really considered his actions the height of his possible honesty? Was his world so hollow apart from her? She remembers then that he had spent his days painting a grand mural of her, and that she is currently in its midst.

Solas could have been true to Cassandra, who had shared his innate sense of justice, or to Varric, who would welcome anyone to his side. He could have been true to Sera, who would at the very least appreciate authenticity, or to Vivienne, who he could unabashedly and wholeheartedly dislike. He could have been true to the Iron Bull, who had likewise torn himself from his own world, or to Dorian who held many of the same intellectual passions. He could have been true to Rainier, who knew what it was to do wrong and cause pain. He could have been true to Cole, who had only wished to help. Had Solas blinded himself to them all, or had he blinded himself to his own personhood?

No, responsibility for his personhood had fallen squarely on Lavellan, and it seemed to be her burden to bear. But she knows that it should not be her weight, it should be Solas’s alone. She hates him for it, for how selfish he is to foist such a thing upon her. Yet at once, she is in love still and as livened as she is mortified by his grasping need for her. She wants his destructive desire to be buried more inextricably within him than her desperation for him is within her. Lavellan wonders if she aches for justice for her wronged self or vengeance upon him. 

As much as Lavellan wants to hit him wherever it may hurt the most, she hopes something in the Fade, some spirit of Benevolence and Balm, is treating him kindly. She supposes that she can begin to draft a response.

Chapter Text

When the mural in the Skyhold rotunda had been half finished, Lavellan had asked Solas when a vagabond mage would have had time to learn to paint. “I’m beginning to think,” she said, “that we had very different ‘living in the woods’ experiences.”

He had looked down over his shoulder at her from the scaffolding with a half-frown. “Did not the Dalish practice such arts?”

Solas had been right, technically—some of her people would take to frescoing abandoned stretches of wall with elven myths as an act of quiet remembrance if the halla lingered long by old ruins. “You were an apostate, not a craftsman.”

With this he’d stood and turned to her, looming above her on his platform. He always moved with a strange grace that Lavellan could not quite grasp the source of. “And you were a hunter, not a stateswoman. If your sole purpose amongst the Dalish was to fell big game, I see no justification for your own forays into the consideration of history and religion.”

Lavellan rolled her eyes as Solas dismounted from the scaffolding, but he presumably did not see the motion with his back turned climbing down the ladder. As always, he had a point, but it just came off so condescendingly. Lavellan was fairly certain that Solas just couldn’t help it. She could have argued with him about the applicability of her ventures—she had spent her evenings at the fireside with her nose in shemlen books to learn how to better cooperate with the humans the clan could not avoid: information was a source of power, and the shreds of power she could hold kept her and her people alive.

But that wasn’t it. Not really: she’d wanted to touch something bigger than her life could afford her. It had all worked out, at least. The only reason she’d been chosen to go to the Conclave was that she alone in the clan had a cursory understanding of Andrasteism and Chantry history gleaned from the study of worn books she’d gathered here and there. Instead of arguing with Solas, Lavellan decided that she had been somewhat unfair to him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to box you in,” she explained quickly. “It’s just…it’s very, very good. I’ve been meaning to say so. Did you train with anyone?”

She really, really, really should have seen it coming: “I once laid my head amongst the rubble of an old manor erected at the time of the Tevinter Imperium’s height. There, a provincial governor played patron of the arts: caring less for high culture than she did for expression, the governor bid the smallfolk and woods-people to come to her hall and perform with the lyre and fiddle, and she forged them fine tools with which to fashion mosaics, murals, and stonework. Borders receded as the fortunes of the mighty fell, and the hall was left silent to decay and dereliction. The memory of the governor’s beneficence, however, preserved itself within the Fade. Amongst others of their kind, spirits of Creativity and Passion stood vigil over the eroded sculptures and shattered mosaics. In discourse with them they ceded me much instruction.” Solas, now standing before her, paused and added, “I did, of course, have to practice. I would not have dared to show my early attempts to a woman I wished to impress—why are you laughing?”

“Solas, you have paint on your nose,” Lavellan had answered, her smile broad. Immediately and reflexively, Solas wiped his face with his forearm, smearing a streak of deep teal onto the sleeve of his already ratty jumper. His cheeks slightly reddened despite his attempt to keep a stoic façade, and Lavellan laughed harder.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she laughed, and beckoned him a few feet forward. “Come here,” Lavellan had urged Solas into her open arms, and after a few moments his brow relaxed and he smiled slightly and took the reluctant steps told her. The two elves folded around one another, Lavellan resting her head on Solas’s shoulder as his hands settled into the small of her back. They swayed slightly as they stood in each other’s arms. “You’re bizarre.” Her words bubbled with mirth and she was sure that she loved him more than she had ever loved another person before.

Solas took a breath in, and she felt his mouth open to protest as his hands slackened slightly from their hold. “If—“

“No, no, it’s a positive thing,” Lavellan had entreatingly assured him. She kissed his dimpled chin and tightened her grasp as he returned the closeness of the embrace. “Unequivocally positive.”

Things had been simpler then, and happier. Lavellan sits in much the same place now, staring at the very mural she had watched him paint for so long. It is unfinished, she knows, and the last of the sketches in the beige plaster of the wall portray some canid crouched in mourning. Of course there’s a wolf in it. With Solas, there’s always a fucking wolf in it.

Wolves are social creatures, Lavellan thinks, and the idea grants her even greater discontent.

She sits back in the room’s armchair and abandons Solas’s letter on the desk to search herself for a fountain pen. She likes them much better than she likes the quills Josephine favors. Fountain pens are much easier to carry around incase one is stricken by the overpowering urge to deface one’s ex-boyfriend’s artwork.

Lavellan decides she won’t, though. Not until Solas pisses her off again. She wonders how much of his story about spirits teaching him to paint was a lie—it is likely that some shreds of truth interspersed his falsehood. Lavellan imagines Solas as some bored god-lord surrounded by wisps and covered in splotches of red and green, paintbrush in hand and books on fresco piled near. She can’t quite conjure an image of him with hair (how would he even wear it?), but it’s almost cute and she almost smiles. Lavellan wonders if it was a more earnest time for Solas.

An audible sigh escapes from her throat. There is paper on the desk, and Lavellan begins to write:

Solas,

I understand more than I care to.

You know as much about me: I’m sensitive to helplessness when it strikes me. I know we’ve talked about this, sort of. I’ve never been sober for it before, and it’s easier to put down in writing.

It’s not strange being a parentless child amongst the Dalish. Such a situation is almost common, as misfortune befalls my people all the time. We’re largely raised communally anyways. But it is strange being the kid whose mother killed herself. Not that people weren’t kind, but their consolation meant little. “Falon’Din took her by the hand and led her away. Do not blame yourself, you could not have done anything, da’len,” I was told. I was maybe ten and believed in the Creators then, but the idea that there was some force that I couldn’t fight against because I was inherently lesser enraged me and added to my confused grief.

When I got older I no longer blamed some myth for my mother’s passing. She had been very troubled for some time, and I still couldn’t have helped her, or done anything about it. The elders were right: I was just a child. But I had grown into a world to which I was at the complete mercy of. We, as Dalish elves, were more often than not chased like rats by the men of minor lords and treated as nothing more than potential victims by many humans we met. I wanted more. I wanted to be able to do more, and it made me miserable. The Keeper told me I needed to temper my aimless ambition and learn to accept reality, that some people would be cruel and powerful and that there was little I could do. I couldn’t and discontent welled within me. She slipped up and told me that I was beginning to remind her of my mother.

Then, the Keeper sent me to spy at the Conclave. I think she was worried about templars hunting Dalish mages along with Circle apostates if the talks did not go well. The whole way from the Marches to the temple I fantasized about finding a reason to never come back. And as you very well know, by some accident I was pulled from obscurity and allowed to stand by the mizzen and helm history instead of faithlessly praying for fair weather in its hold. When the storm settled, I had helped end two wars, slayed a monster grasping at godhood, and stood at the top of the world able to do anything.

Even with a broken heart, I was happier than I had ever been. I won’t pretend I don’t like holding power. I know that this has always sat uneasily with you. I swear to you what I always have: Power is my means, and not my end. I still promise you that I will cede my seat if that ever changes. It’s strange to say this sort of thing to an enemy.

Two years passed and I discovered that I’d been, essentially, some puppet master’s toy. It makes my blood boil still. Your magic. Your mistake. Your castle, and now your war. I’m bound to you and it makes me sick. What would I be without you? Surely not what I am now—you made me and gave me all I had thought I had fought for and earned. What agency did I have?

Fen’Harel took me by the hand and led me away. I couldn’t have done anything.

But he fact that we war now heartens me: if we’re at odds, I can’t be your helpless plaything. Even as you lie and scheme and try to twist me to your ends, I can and I will challenge you. Perhaps you gave me the tools with which I fight, but I claim some ownership of them by taking them in hand against you. I now go toe to toe with the closest thing to a god that has walked this world, and I am determined to look him in the eye as an equal.

Yet I will never claim to be anything more than a mortal woman, an elf. I don’t see why the fact of what I am should limit me, as if I need to be a deity or prophet to be efficacious. I know that I am arrogant. Maybe that makes me no better than Corypheus or the Evanuris, but I have little choice. Would you have me lie down and acquiesce to you? (Actually, Solas, don’t answer that.) One day my pride may be my downfall, but for now it gives me enough strength to lead the people of the Inquisition against you.

At once, my weakness and power are tied into you. This is not the only dual role you play in my life: at once, you are my great love and my most dangerous nemesis, and as much as we wish we could, we cannot separate those things: our affection and our war poison each other in equal measures.

Despite myself I regard you at once with tenderness and loathing, with a learned wariness and a trust that I have tried violently to root out of my heart. We want as we war, and attempt to preserve what we can as we seek to destroy. You are a mystery to me and yet I know you intimately, and we spill our hearts to one another as we lie through our teeth. I fear you and fear for you, wish you the best and curse your name. Our war is both deeply personal and terrifyingly universal in its consequences, and if I do prevail I will have to regard the victory with great joy and immense sorrow. And these fucking terrible letters stir the worst anxiety you could imagine within me, yet are some of the greatest comforts of my days.

You are my everything: my world is contingent entirely upon you. Though I’m nowhere near as eloquent, I am as hopelessly mad over you as you are over me. Anything that can be felt I feel for you and my thoughts can never stray from you for long. You consume me and I am as helpless as ever in your hands, and I take little comfort knowing that you are trapped too. We are both powerless to change a single thing about where we stand, not while we both still remain in this world with our minds and ambitions intact.

I think that the worst of it is that I honestly do love you for you. Sometimes I wish that the person I came to care for wasn’t at all real, that he was part of your plan to ensnare me and bend me to your will. But I believe you when you say that it was as real as it could be for you. I’m sitting in your atrium right now and remember you getting paint all over yourself. I never understood how you could be so absolutely dorky and beautifully elegant at once, but it made me weak in my knees. I feel bad that our shared moments could never be as quite as pure for you as they were for me. And I think that if we lived in a different world, where I was just Adahlen and you were just Solas and we had a real chance at being happy, I could have loved you just as much as I do now without it being sick or painful.

It’s odd saying this, and I never told you, but while we were together, I thought that there might have been some sort of forever for the two of us. I’d never really thought about that kind of thing before, not with anyone.

I suppose that we might have that forever still. However this goes, history will likely remember us. What a mess.

Lavellan does not know whether to sign with her name or title. She wishes there was a distinction between her two capacities. Her final decision rests almost entirely with wishful thinking.

Yours always,

Adahlen

She swallows the lump in her throat and searches the desk for an envelope. There's nothing of the sort on the desk, and Lavellan will have to leave the rotunda to find one. It has grown dark, and it is best that she go. Solas’s presence still permeates the space, and it makes her want to remain.

The next day, Lavellan sits before the hall’s fire with Solas’s response, which she had found laying upon the cushion of her throne:

Adahlen,

You have told me of your mother’s death before. Ir uth'abelas, ma vhenan.

I wish there was some other end for us. I agree: in another world, our love could have been something other than obsessive and destructive, grown free of twists and tangles into something beautiful. I am sorry that it has to be this way.

I take one issue with your letter: I do not seek to destroy you, though perhaps inadvertently I have wrought damages. For now, the aims of the Inquisition in this world that do not involve me are ones I would not challenge. Equity for elves, a support of mage freedom, checks on more dangerous powers, and a stay of the violence that change tends to elicit—these are worthy goals. Most certainly your Inquisition will one day fall to power-grasping in the name of self-preservation, but for now it does some right in the twilight of this world. I will not pretend that your ambition does not deeply unsettle me, lethallan. It always has.Yet I am compelled to trust your restraint and self-awareness. I commiserate with you when you say I stir conflict and contradictions within you.

Among the worst of my conundrums regarding you is what I must eventually wreak upon myself. I have realized that I must not harden my heart but destroy it in full. I cannot continue in loving you so unless I wish to be remiss in my duty: the part of me that adores you so is the part that pains to lay ruin to this world, and I must excise it entirely in order to carry on. Yet I have not done that, not as of now. It is inevitable that the die must be cast, and it is in weakness and foolishness that I delay what must come.

I have told you that you render me unto myself. I write you still in part to keep me whole because I dislike what I will become, less a man than an animal once more. I shall die alone in such a state, be it at the time of my destruction of the Veil or thousands of years hence. When I am done I will feel no pain over any of it, but that thought comforts me none. It is not a happy thing to know about one’s future, that one will lose the entirety of one’s self. I am afraid, vhenan, and hold tight to you and your words as palliative pleasures, even though they have as of late been strained. Reasonably so, I think.

I am selfish to cling to the last shreds of my personhood so, and in turn to you. And it is selfish for me to confide this in you. I did not intend to when I began this letter, but perhaps it is for the best that you begin to know my truth. I will speak no more of such matters if you do not wish it upon yourself.

Solas

He calls her his heart in his favorite term of endearment, Lavellan thinks. She is sorry to know exactly why. The Inquisitor scribbles a response on another sheet of paper:

Solas,

But you have already yoked me with your entirety. Though it may have been wrong of you to do so, that entirety is a burden that I intend to bear. I would take all of your pain onto myself if I knew it could help you in some way. I hope that you know that.

You apologized again in your letter, don’t do that unless you mean to change,

Adahlen

After preparing and placing the letter, Lavellan stands and walks out to the stairs leading up to the main body of the castle. It is overcast and will likely rain soon, but the summer is warm the courtyard is busy: Josephine hosts a gaggle of Fereldan teryns at a small picnic on the lawn, and Scout Harding is in from the leg of her latest mission, amusing a small but varied crowd with trick shots from some enchanted bow that is likely of Dagna’s design. Somehow, Cullen’s mabari has gotten loose from the kennels, and is joyously chasing around three amused off-duty soldiers, who bid the hound to play fetch with a discarded shoe. Lavellan knows one of the women to be a spy for Solas. She seems so happy, and sneaks a kiss with her human compatriot while their other friend playfully wrestles with the dog. The Inquisitor wonders how real that kiss is, and if it would be more unfair to the man if it came from a place of truth or duplicity.

Lavellan almost turns to withdraw to her quarters. She is emotionally exhausted, yet the courtyard calls to her. The churning air outside is muggy but not altogether unpleasant, and Lavellan decides that she has the evening spend the last few hours before the rain amongst people. Though it is tempting to do so, she refuses to be entirely miserable on Solas’s account.

Lavellan retires to her room, and dries herself even as she calls for a bath to be drawn. She smells of sweat, rainfall and dog—much to the amusement of literally everyone (except, perhaps, for a horrified Commander, who had stuttered his apologies over the matter profusely), the mabari had opted to play a spirited game of keep-away with her glasses. She’d forgotten about most else while she ran to and fro, chasing the dog as the three soldiers and Harding tried to help corner it as they all laughed. Sometimes Lavellan forgets how much she really, really likes people until she is surrounded by them.

As the bath is filled by Skyhold’s servants, Lavellan reads a letter that she had found on the lawn:

Adahlen,

I would not have you shoulder my suffering.

I have thought before of making you hate me, of finding a way to force pure loathing forth from you. Such a singular emotion might be more palatable for you than whatever muddle that I now stir. Perhaps such was my intent, conscious or not, when I manipulated you against the Qun’s spies in my ranks—part of me wished to be caught, to elicit from you vitriol and spite that would protect you from following me into my darkest depths. But I could not stay my course and keep myself away from you, and I fear that I may have only served to temper our unfortunate ties.

I had truly hoped you would have been able to find, if not happiness, some respite from misery. It seems now that both you and I have committed to inflicting upon ourselves the worst possible pain. It is likely that when we fall, it shall be hand in hand.

But you can still save yourself: you need not be drawn into the depths to drown with me. Though in the short term it may sting more, it might benefit us both for you to change your mind and run. Though I hold to you desperately, I would not try to stop you if you decide it is best to go. Perhaps we are doomed, but you can still spare yourself added injury by me.

Solas

The Inquisitor closes her eyes and exhales in deeply pained exasperation.

The bath is almost ready, but Lavellan has time to pen a rejoinder. She is more exhausted than angry, and at least can take him to task:

Seriously, Solas?,

It's far too late for me to run. Haven’t you heard me? I’m already dealing with all of your bullshit, whether that was your intention or not. I can’t tell if you think me to be made of glass or steel: you mourn that everything you do might shatter me, but continue to treat me as if I can suffer the most serious injuries and still stand intact. At once you demand my presence and forsake my attempts to truly reach out to you. It's insulting.

Listen: I have made my decision. I will be here for you as long as I believe that you have the capacity to love me.

We are not going down together. If I have my way, we’re not going down at all. Perhaps I could never have saved my mother, but I refuse to believe that I cannot save you from yourself. I will not consign myself to your end, and I hope you come to feel the same. I heard you say it to the Nightmare when we physically walked the Fade at Adamant: Nothing is inevitable. I do not believe that you are hopeless, and I will fight for you and the world at once. Even though you’ve given me ample reason to think otherwise, you’re a brilliant man who can do good if he wants to. You have a choice, and can still change your path and walk away from death with me.

Telanadas,

Adahlen

P.S. Let us talk of happier things, if we can. I miss our small intimacies as much as you do.

After she leaves the letter outside her door and passes off some silvers to those who had drawn it for her, Lavellan disrobes, removes her prosthetic, and sinks into the waiting tub.

The water is warm and she leans back to submerge her shoulders, which are always tense and sore. How had it gotten like this, she wondered? The last few letters to and from Solas had been truly miserable to read and send. She had spent a whole summer exchanging petty pleasantries and tiny jokes with her lover, and suddenly there was nothing left to share but heavy-handed diatribes of obsession and illness.

Lavellan supposed that falling into the trap with the Chantry mother had forced her to face some sort of reality: what was between them was tainted and would probably never be good again, even if she did spare the world from his mad plans. The knowledge of what had occurred between the two of them and the sickness that had saturated their love could not so easily be washed away. A pang arises in Lavellan’s chest. She had been so happy with him for what felt like so long, and this was the end of it all.

She had even begun to mentally compare him to her dead mother. It was a sour string of thoughts on every level, and she wondered when that had started. Lavellan supposed the death had been a traumatic enough event: she had made her peace with it long ago but it shaped her still. She hated that Solas made her feel the same way, powerless to stop someone’s worst designs on themselves. Lavellan wondered if she could have helped her mother if she was any older, if she had understood what was going on. Even with knowledge and voice, it wasn’t as if she could ever control another person when it came to their interiority, and it wasn’t just interiority with Solas. His self-immolation wasn’t solely self-immolation.

In truth, the Inquisitor had few memories of her mother. Lavellan knew that she had been drunk more often than not. Elainis Lavellan had always been distant and troubled, and even while she lived, her aunts and uncles had treated young Adahlen much as their own as her mother had slipped away. “I don’t remember Aunt Elainis well, but I think she would have been proud of you,” her cousin had said in the Wycome market. She imagines speaking to her mother now.

“How do you spend your days now that you are grown, da’len?”

“Well, mom,” Lavellan would say to her mother’s ghost, “the usual. I left the clan, but I saved the world and now I’m a very important public figure involved in the highest political spheres of Thedas. There are these shemlen utensils called ‘forks’ that make eating easier, and I think the Dalish really should try them. You might like Skyhold. It’s a very different here, and maybe that would have done you some good. It certainly did me. Oh, am I seeing anyone? Yes, actually: I’m in a very messy relationship with one of the Creators.” Her mother probably would think she was kidding. Lavellan realizes that she remembers little of the woman's personality.

Lavellan leans forward in the water and reachs awkwardly upwards to rub her right shoulder with her right hand before turning to the easier task of massaging the left. She looks at her right hand when she is done. Though the poultice the sisters at the cathedral had administered had healed the cuts she inflicted on herself by punching through the window at the Old Quarter Chantry, they had scarred in pale purple grooves. She grabs for the soap on a small table at the bath side and begins the task of washing herself. She’d never deal with what Solas was putting her through if she didn’t have to for the sake of the world. Did she have any agency at all in her own relationship? If Solas was just a man—

Is he just a man? He certainly believes so, or wants to. Lavellan will never admit it to him, but the concept of Solas being a mythological villain is sort of sexy to her. It is strangely titillating to be needed so badly by the object of legends come to life. The idea plays so enticingly into her delusions of grandeur, and she legitimately feels ashamed about the part of her that enjoys the situation.

But, no, Solas is just a man, and she had fallen in love with him as such. Lavellan remembered that when the field of battle did not call them, they would often read together, the silence punctuated by her sudden sharing of facts and his quiet hums of thought. They both compulsively gathered information, but for different reasons: Lavellan looked for useable tools, and Solas did so for knowledge’s own sake. There was a peace and beauty in his ends that she had admired. Not that Solas was perfect by any means: he was overly critical, somewhat pedantic, pessimistic to a fault, and arrogant. But Lavellan supposed she could forgive him for their shared flaw, and under all the prickling fatalism, there seemed to be a world-weary compassion. And he had loved her back for her quickness and uncertainty and bravery and optimism.

And she hates thinking about it out of a sort of odd embarrassment: Lavellan had never felt so desired (wanted, certainly, by the manifold of agrarian elves and human hunters she’d coupled with in the woods and on smalltown tavern beds over the years, but never desired, coveted dearly as the whole of her body, mind, and spirit) or desired someone herself so much as she did with Solas. She was perhaps more vulnerable to him than she should have allowed herself to be. Lavellan had been amazed that in the chaos of the world falling apart, she had incidentally met someone that she could find so much joy in.

At the root of it, Solas is still just Solas, Lavellan can't help but know. Even if he is thousands of years old, supposedly an antagonistic force in her culture’s religion, and a lying jackass, Lavellan is certain that she has seen and touched the heart of who he is. Some facts remained unchanged: The two of them had met in a complete accident and had fallen in love of their own natural accords.

Lavellan curls into a ball in the water, her chin dipping beneath the surface as she rests it on her knees. She does not know if she loves him of her own accord anymore, and hates to think of it. The idea that she might be forcing herself to remain emotionally intimate with Solas and is only attempting to save him for the sake of the world disgusts her. If her love were such a duty, she would be trapped, and that trap is cruel to them both. The binds cut into her less when she allows them to be trussed voluntarily.

No, Lavellan thinks. She does not love Solas because she has to love him. She loves him because he is himself and she fights to save him because he is worth saving. She could still battle against him, fight him without hope for him in her heart and love on her lips. Lavellan could protect the world without an ounce of care for him. It is by her own choice that she reaches out for him still. There is something she can do, and she will do it because she wants to.

Lavellan, however dedicated to the idea of redemptive love she may be, isn’t one to put all of her eggs into one basket. She walks the ramparts with Scout Lace Harding, far and away from potential eavesdroppers.

“How are you, Harding?” she asks the tiny operative.

“You really wanna know, huh, Inquisitor?” Harding replies. She shrugs with a small smile. “All right, considering what’s at stake. Again. But saving the world is worth it, especially when I think of spending all the hazard pay I’ve been getting. But as for secrecy…I don’t think anyone’s noticed us move the lyrium, even if they know we’re buying it. I’m surprised that I feel like I can trust the Carta guys we have running with us as much as I do.”

“Varric did vouch for them,” Lavellan offers. Harding’s unit is mostly dwarves, as they alone can manage raw lyrium in large quantities, and its numbers had required supplementation. “Was it your idea to postmark Vivienne’s letter through Halamshiral instead of delivering it by hand?”

“Yeah, it was my idea to make it look like Vivienne was somewhere else. But I’m worried spies might notice that she’s conspicuously not in Halamshiral. If I have to carry some word for her again, I guess I could do it through a town near one of the de Ghyslain estates next time…Hm,” Harding muses. “I’m good at sneaking around, but I never thought I’d have to be this, well…sneaky.” She lets out a small giggle.

“Well, you could probably use Halamshiral again at some point. I have a meeting with her there in a few weeks. Tell me, how is it at The Undisclosed Location?” Lavellan asks. “I would hate to see personal chemistry interfere with such an important operation.” Compromising the eluvian network would put a massive dent in Solas’s plans, and she will not see it fall to squabbling.

“Oh, The Undisclosed Location? A little tense, but it’s working. Merrill’s really nice. I like her a lot. Vivienne doesn’t seem to, but she’s kept it professional.” Lavellan doesn’t know Merrill well herself, but is unsurprised to learn that the straight-laced Circle politician dislikes the Dalish blood mage. She had been nervous about bringing Vivienne into the fold of The Operation, considering her intended company and her preoccupation with managing her new Circle. The Inquisition had searched for Morrigan for her help, but to no avail. When, in secret, the Inquisition asked Vivienne to put her rigorous, Circle-taught knowledge of magic theory to use in manipulating the eluvians, she very quickly and wholeheartedly agreed to the mission. Harding continues: “I don’t think Merrill notices, though. She's a bit spacey. Is the templar cover story still going strong?”

Lavellan nods. “Cassandra’s been putting the ‘Ser M’ name on some Seeker missions throughout Thedas. I got word that he was instrumental in slaying an abomination that had taken hold of a Circle Loyalist stronghold last week.”

“Funny thing, though,” Harding inserts, “is that we actually have templars on it now. Vivienne brought them. She says she needs their powers to do what they’re doing, and Merrill hasn’t objected, even if she’s antsy about it, what with being from Kirkwall and all. It’s going well, though. At least I think. I have to get out there again soon. The shipment of lyrium from the Merchant’s Guild should be ready to go.” The dwarven woman grows distant for a moment and stares out over the mountains, and Lavellan remembers that she’s not the only one carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.

“Lace,” Lavellan says, “Thank you. Tell Merrill and Vivienne and all the templars that I say so.”

After a while, the two part, and Lavellan alights from the ramparts near the stables. She finds a letter sitting on the well weighed down in the wind with a stone.

Adahlen,

I do not know what I have done to deserve such patience and affection from you. I assure you that it means much to me.

To pay you back, I can attempt to heed your conversational request. I am unsure of what happy things to speak of. Ah, I know. I have been having trouble finding things that I wish to speak to in the Fade as of late, but last night I slept well and came upon a Spirit of Companionship. We conversed for some time and it told me I was lucky to have you indeed. The benediction made me somewhat sad, but I am glad that something so pure recognized your value and importance to me.

You mentioned my painting. It may interest you to know that I have picked up the habit anew. I find some peace in the quiet focus and contemplation, and you have said yourself that my living quarters need some color. I would have you to visit again, in some capacity, if it weren’t a terrible idea.

I know you have said not to apologize, but I am sorry that I place so much upon you. You are right: I should not regard you as a thing so easily shatterable. If you so willingly accept what I foist upon you, then it is only right of me to be receptive, to the extent I can be without being dishonest to my purpose, to the support and affection that you might extend. I know it means little coming from a liar, but I make this promise for myself as much as I do to you: I will not again attempt to sabotage our relationship or rebuke you even as I draw you near.

Perhaps we may find some modicum of happiness still.

Solas

Lavellan isn’t sure if she herself is convinced his promise or his last statement, but for now she is doing all that she can, for him and for the world. And for just a moment, she lets herself believe that she’ll make it so that one day she can laugh at Solas for getting paint all over himself all over again.

Chapter Text

“But did you have to bring the papers to my office, Seeker?” Varric asks as Cassandra carries the last of twelve massive boxes into the chamber. He’s busy paging through requests for city liquor licenses and is vaguely debating sabotaging any tavern that dares encroach on the Hanged Man’s turf, and breifly considers calling Bran to escort the Seeker and her twelve boxes out of the office. Then again, Varric doesn’t really want his seneschal dead at the hands of an angry Nevarran princess.

The Seeker narrows her eyes, and begins to pace around the room. “Yes. I may need help. Stories corroborated. Witness testimony. Public opinion on matters. Advice on where to find evidence. The resources of this office. I have an inkling that not all of this information is complete, or even accurate,” she asserts. The Seeker is in Kirkwall on official business—as part of her new Order, she wishes to redress the wrongs that the templars of Kirkwall had done over the past decade, and has taken to what records are left from the Gallows as a starting point. Varric doesn’t bother to tell her that she might die of old age before even counting them: not even his penchant for irritating Cassandra makes him want to dissuade her from her noble mission. Some restitution for Kirkwall’s happenings would do the city good. 

Instead, the Viscount will shirk his own duty. “Do you really want me corroborating stories?” the dwarf laughs. “That’s rich. Did you forget about the last time you tried to get me to confirm a written record?”

“Of course I did not forget, Varric,” Cassandra replies tartly. She stops walking and tries not to sound disappointed when she adds, “I thought that we were past that. The lying, I mean.” She looks troubled. Much of Varric’s bitterness over her kidnapping him has subsided over the years. He even sort of thinks of her as a friend. After all, how could he hate someone that liked Swords and Sheilds? Of all things, Swords and Shields! It was like having affection for a three-legged nug or something.

“All right. Ask away when you’re ready,” Varric says in a softer voice.

Cassandra bows her head with a slight smile that very quickly fades. “I will have questions ready soon.” 

Varric continues, “And if she’s not too busy, you might want to ask Aveline to look at the Guard incident reports. You might learn some things from the discrepancies: three mages apprehended, two confirmed checked into the Gallows and etcetera.” He doesn’t envy Cassandra’s work. He hates dealing with morbid crap like that. It told the same tale over and over again: People are monsters when they can get away with it. It’s a piss-poor moral, as far as Varric is concerned.

Cassandra glances at the door and slams it shut. She steps towards Varric and her voice drops a little. “Should she be wearing that breastplate still? Her armor looks to be getting…snug around her middle. But perhaps it is not my place to say.”

Gossip! Suggestions of unsolicited advice! Yes! Varric loves it! “You’re asking me? I have no idea how these things work! You humans just blow up like balloons when you get pregnant.” It was so much more compact for dwarves. Thicker waists, smaller babies. “But Aveline probably knows best. She told me she’ll do desk work once she gets far enough along. I can’t wait for the kid, especially because—“

“You have naming rights? Yes, you have said so twenty times today,” Cassandra almost glowers. Varric objects to the mischaracterization. It had been eighteen times, counting the one she interrupted! “You need to stop antagonizing that poor woman on that subject, Varric.”

“That poor woman? Aveline? Let me tell you something: the only person more downright terrifying than the Captain of the Guard is you, Seeker,” he says. Varric gives a half-sigh. “Besides, I, uh, I think Aveline, Donnic, and I are thinking of the same name anyways.” 

“Oh,” Cassandra breathes. She does not need any explanation, and falls quiet. Varric’s glad that he doesn’t need to draw the matter out—it is one thing he does not want to talk about at length.

He musters some cheer and beckons Cassandra toward the desk. “Hey, you’re in on The Operation, right?” 

“Yes, I have had some discreet Seekers pretending to be the Inquisition’s Ser Mystery on some of our missions, if that is what you mean. Usually ones in which we deal with rogue mages.“ Was that really what the M in Ser M stood for? Varric had thought it was for ‘Merrill.’ Then again, they apparently called the worksite for The Operation The Undisclosed Location. Either the Inquisitor and Ruffles had named everything as a joke, or Curly had done it in complete seriousness. Cassandra all but whispers, ”I heard from the Commander about the leak in the Merchants’ Guild that necessitated the rumors. Is that still an—”

“No, I took care of it. Found and plugged,” Varric answers. Varric had gotten some of his people to do a little digging to turn up which of the bearded weasels in the Merchants’ Guild had sold the information to spies of Fen’Harel. Once he got the name, Varric had promptly released so much blackmail that not only did the Guild cast the leak out, but his wife left him, his teenaged children disowned him and changed their names, most inns in Southern Thedas instructed their staff to not let him in, and a warrant for his arrest was put out in Antiva City. In their own capacities, both Varric and Cassandra were playing their bit parts in the ongoing shadow war against Solas. Varric shakes his head over the whole situation. “Arggh, what the actual fuck, Chuckles?” In other news, Varric knows he is still being spied on. Then again, he figures it's par for the course for politicians. The weird elves must have gotten another weird mirror to do weird things with: luckily, Varric is good at hiding secrets. He knows for a fact who the spies in his household are, and that none of them have gone anywhere close to any sensitive information. 

“I still cannot believe it,” Cassandra says. Her eyes grow distant. She’d really liked the elf on a personal level. So had Varric, when Solas wasn’t talking out his ass about what he thought of the state of the dwarves. The Seeker lets out a disgusted noise. “Ugh. I can only imagine how the Inquisitor feels. Upset and enraged, I presume. I have been very busy and have not seen her in some time. Perhaps when I am next summoned to Val Royeaux to sit at the Council I may make a detour to Skyhold.”

“You know she writes him letters, right?” Varric asks. Right from the get go, he’d told the Inquisitor that it would go wrong, but the idea of two people writing their feelings to one another in long form hit a sort of soft spot within the dwarf. Varric himself can't write about love, of all things. It was why Swords and Shields had been truly horrible. 

In fact, whispers had reached Varric that only one demographic that had liked it other than Violent, Stabby Nevarran Seekers, and that was the Qunari. The Kirkwall constituency of the past decade had apparently been enormously bored and perversely fascinated with the completely alien concept of romantic love. Dubious sources had informed Varric that each week, the Arishok had held a book circle with the rest of the marooned antaam to discuss the developments of each chapter. Another rumor abounded that one of the Arishok’s main reasons for attempting to raze Kirkwall was the tragic and dramatic death of Knight-Lieutenant Eastley, with whom he had wanted Knight-Captain Valentia to end up instead of her true love Captain Ronnic. For the sake of his own sanity, Varric has to doubt that.

Anyways, regardless of whether or not those rumors were true, shortly after the Qunari had left for Par Vollen the sales of Swords and Shields had plummeted into the gutters, mostly because it was garbage and belonged there. So there was actually numerical evidence that Varric wasn’t very good at writing romance. At least Bianca had told him that his flailing attempts at textual affection towards her were endearing.

The Seeker nods in affirmation of Varric’s question. “Yes. I heard from Leliana of the Chantry debacle.” Cassandra pauses, and adds, “Do you think they are love letters?” The Seeker suddenly gets flustered. “I-I mean, it’s not my business—just…”

“Oh, they’re definitely love letters,” Varric says. The Inquisitor had never let him see any of the notes she had passed off in Kirkwall, but he’s sure they were all amorous in nature. Or he’d rather believe that. Varric always cheers for star-crossed lovers, perhaps because he is one himself. “But hey, why take my word for it. Let’s ask him.”

Cassandra is confused. “Who? Solas?”

“Why not?” Varric grins, “It might be entertaining. Come on, we’ve gotta do it.”

Hey, Chuckles. What’s going on between you and the Inquisitor? Are you still on good terms after you went and completely screwed her over?

The shaking elven kitchen-boy he had cornered and sent off earlier hands Varric a folded sheet of paper. “He said I shouldn’t look at it, ser, Lord Viscount Tethras ser.”

“Thanks, kid. Look Seeker, we’ve got mail!” Varric waves the envelope, and the servant shakes harder as he very quickly withdraws from the office, tripping over the runner as he leaves. “…are you okay?” Varric asks, and the young man doesn’t answer as he haplessly pulls himself from the floor and scrambles away. The dwarf decides that he’s not going to make the poor kid deliver any more letters. He was already on the verge of wetting his pants.

Cassandra jumps up from her pile of dismal paperwork quicker than she probably should. “What does it say?”

“That they’ve written a novel’s worth of full-blown erotica to one another! Just page after page detailing the torrid, kinky elf sex they want to have.”

“He did not write that!” demands Cassandra, who begins crossing the room presumably to end Varric’s life.

“Fine, fine! Don’t impale me, or the letter. Since I know how much you love taking your anger out on paper.” Varric reads aloud as Cassandra seethes to herself:

Whatever words I may exchange with the Inquisitor are none of your business, child of the Stone.

“Oh, that’s so typical. It probably actually is elf erotica.” Varric mumbles under his breath, but starts laughing as he reads the next few lines. “No way.” 

“What is it?” The Seeker’s thick Nevarran accent flares in her curiosity.

I was not going to respond to your letter. I have little to say that would be informative or comforting to you. However, I wish to ask your opinion on a matter concerning the Inquisitor. If you are unaware, it will be her thirtieth birthday soon. I had completely forgotten until I was informed that Lady Montilyet was going to great lengths to try to procure the ingredients for a very singular cake for the occasion. The matter actually crossed my desk because my spies believed her to be requisitioning the components of some sort of chemical weapon.  

I would like to get the Inquisitor something with which to mark the day, and I am not very good at giving gifts. Thus I find myself asking for your advice. 

Considering that once, a near-belligerently drunk Lavellan had told Varric that Chuckles’ idea of a gift was taking her to a wyvern’s nest to propose to alter her face, the Viscount is inclined to agree with the elf’s self-assessment. Reflexively, Varric wracks his brain for ideas, but comes up short. The Inquisitor didn't exactly have time for hobbies while Varric was living at Skyhold.

Varric briefly reflects on the letter he has just read. Solas had explicitly stated that he was writing Varric back for the Inquisitor’s sake alone—he didn’t want to talk to some inconsequential dwarf sitting on a throne in Hightown. Yet he did write, and not on a particularly urgent matter. Varric figures that Solas is lonely, and he wonders if the elf recognizes that. Chuckles had always been more affected by the people around him than he allowed himself to believe, as if his conceptual distance was some sort of strictly self-imposed veneer. Varric figures that only person Chuckles had ever certainly accepted as important was the Inquisitor: either he truly was reaching out in her interest, or it was an excuse born of questionable awareness.

Cassandra doesn’t seem to be interested in ruminating on the implication of the elf's words. “Flowers!” she insists in response, “Or perhaps a stuffed animal!”

Varric raises an eyebrow. “What’s gotten into you, Seeker?”

He expects another swell of anger from the woman, but Cassandra only sighs. “Perhaps it is that I am glad to see that Solas is still himself.” 

Varric gets it, but asks, “You don’t think that makes it worse? It’s easier to fight a monster than a misguided man. It can be a tragedy when the latter falls, even when you're rooting for the hero.”

“You may be right. Maybe that should be more distressing, but—” she falls silent, as if she is grappling for words, and Varric realizes that she has indeed thought about it, “—but if he is genuine about caring for the Inquisitor, then perhaps there was a chance that some aspect of his friendship with me or you was real. That being said, if I see him in person again, I am strangling him. For the Inquisitor and for the rest of us.” 

Varric knows exactly how to get the envelope collected by an unsuspecting spy. He writes ‘IMPORTANT: DO NOT READ’ on it and leaves it unsealed on his desk: 

She’s your girlfriend, Chuckles. Shouldn’t you know what to get her? And why are you asking us?

Anyways, the Seeker’s here trying to sort through all of the mess the templars made while they were at their worst. Even though that’s a lot of work, we had some time to take in the city sights. Unfortunately, it rained the other day, so we couldn’t do the burning buildings tour, but the water accentuated the rivers of filth and highlighted the problem with our misplaced reservoirs. We also got a portrait done by Meredith’s petrified corpse—there’s a guy at the Gallows that can do one in charcoal in like fifteen minutes.

Oh, here’s an idea: Take the Inquisitor on a romantic vacation to Kirkwall! I know she was here recently, but I’d think she’d appreciate spending the time with you. The brand-new Kirkwall Bureau of Tourism thanks you for your time and whatever money you spend within the city limits.

But anyways, Cassandra has more ideas about birthday gifts than me: Antivan chocolates, stuffed animals, jewelry, flowers, wine, poetry. But I think those are Cassandra’s own interests, so I’d take it with a grain of salt. I was thinking that you could maybe do a homemade thing and decide not to destroy the world, but who am I to say? Or you could find some way give her left hand back. It’s not regifting if you didn’t ask her for permission when you took it off! Maybe you could just get her a really nice pen or something. She would actually probably like that a lot, since she’s always busy with paperwork.

Varric and Cassandra leave the office for some air and a round of Wicked Grace in Lowtown, and of course the letter vanishes while they are gone. 

“Made tranquil for keeping a pet rabbit…” Cassandra grumbles dejectedly to herself as she pours over a ledger the next day. “Perhaps I can find her if I contact the family. Even if she does not live still, they should be afforded proper condolences. And ugh!” She falls silent for a moment, but then asks, “Varric, do you recall an incident with runaway mage children? It says there was a public bulletin calling for their recapture.”

 “The one in the spring of 9:36?” Varric asks. “Yeah, but they were never found. That’s the last most anyone in the city heard about it.”

“That is not what it says here. But this next thing is scratched out! Perhaps if I contact the Commander he may remember the case…?”

Varric looks at his own pile of papers. He’d rather be writing stories than scribbling his name over and over again on dotted lines. Maybe he’ll authorize something to be demolished soon. That will be fun.

The bored Viscount sifts through the pile of mail that sits upon his desk. “Hey, look, kindling,” Varric says, and snatches the three letters from the Prince of Starkhaven, one of which is labeled ‘VERY IMPORTANT, PLEASE READ,’ another of which is labeled ‘VERY VERY IMPORTANT, PLEASE READ, and another of which is labeled ‘DECLARATION OF WAR, PLEASE READ AND RESPOND’ for at least the third time that month, and walks with them toward the fireplace, which is lit for the first time in the early fall. If Sebastian ever actually raises an army, Varric decides he’s going to tell him that his letters got lost in the post when the forces of Starkhaven show up. As he pitches the letters into the blaze, he notices that he is has picked up a fourth envelope, which is unmarked.

He clears his throat to read it aloud, and Cassandra pauses in her work to listen:

Master Tethras, Seeker Cassandra, why you? You have both proven yourself to be noble and admirable people. Also, you know the Inquisitor well.  

I did consider a pen, as I have already gifted her sweets in the past. But as my interaction with the Inquisitor relies almost solely on the written word, I thought it to be a self-serving present. It would be like gifting your lover lingerie with the implication being that they wear it to bed for you.

“They totally write elf erotica! Look who called it!”

I suppose that makes it sound like the contents of my letters to her are inappropriate.

As a note, I am not going to give the Inquisitor lingerie.

Unbidden, she sent me a letter telling me not to get her a birthday gift if I was thinking about doing so. Frankly, I am unsure as to whether or not I should continue in my plan.

“Of course he still should!” Cassandra says, her brows raising.

“I don’t know, Seeker. She said not to,” Varric ventures. “Sometimes people have good reasons for that request.” Usually when he disobeyed Bianca on that order, her family sent assassins after him. He fondly remembered an incident where they sent a soup tureen filled with lyrium sand rigged to explode to his address at the Hanged Man because he had been caught sending her a Feast Day gift. The Kirkwall Charter of Rights has conflicting edicts about whether or not he has the right to remain silent about what ensued.

Cassandra sighs. “I guess you are right. Still, something small would not hurt. Nothing big, or extravagant, but I am sure the Inquisitor would not get mad over a little gift.” She frowns slightly, and it looks like she is thinking. “He should ask her about it. It is not a surprise, then, but I suppose it would be considerate.”

 “Oh, because consideration for others is such a strong point for him,” Varric laughs as he takes out another piece of paper. “I suppose Chuckles has to start somewhere.”

A series of notes exchanged over the next week, largely through the Viscount’s legion of couriers, some more confused about what they are carrying than others:

Cassandra says to ask the Inquisitor for permission about sending something small.

 In response:

She asked me what I was playing at.

Varric’s courier apologizes that the previous note sent from the Viscount’s office was stolen from his bag, and promises not to lose the next one:

Can you really blame her, though? And what are you playing at, anyways? Is the destruction of the Inquisition your actual secret birthday gift to Lavellan? That way, she can ring in the big three-zero shattered, defeated, and unemployed in the depths of despair.

 “I forgot that the Inquisitor was so young when this all began,” Cassandra interrupts Varric to muse. “I suppose I was younger when I was named Right Hand of the Divine, and Hawke became the Champion of Kirkwall around the same age, but still. She would have been twenty-five at the time of the Conclave. …Maker, Solas is so much older than her.” She scrunches her nose slightly.

Varric raises a brow. “You know he’s not actually in his forties like we are, right? Chuckles is middle-aged for a geological formation.”

“That only makes it all the stranger.”

Before he hands the note off to the soon-to-be-disappointed courier, Varric adds to the letter:

Cassandra thinks you’re too old for your girlfriend. What’s that rule? Take your age, divide it by half and add seven? By that logic, in a few centuries, you might be able to start dating the Tevinter Imperium.  

Dropped outside Varric’s office:

I am indeed much, much too old for my girlfriend. Admittedly, I felt very odd about it at first, too.

I understand why you might believe that I am being insincere. Why would I ask for advice if this were some sort of plot? And, before you think to ask, if this were some design against you, Child of the Stone and Seeker, what end might I have?

I assure you that my intentions are as pure as any man’s who seeks the romantic attention and affection of a woman might be. While my actions are by no means altruistic, my interest in this affair lies primarily in the Inquisitor’s happiness.

Varric assures the courier that it’s really, really all right that the notes are going missing, and he isn’t going to get fired:

Tell her that, then! Cassandra thinks it’s sort of sweet.

Do you even have a gift for her yet, Chuckles? You might want to get on that, since it's only a few days away. The Inquisitor reads a lot. Maybe a book? Maybe even a book I would get royalties from? Or send her something you’ve talked about recently. Cassandra says that she’ll be able to tell you’re thinking about her that way. I don’t know if that’s charming or not if you’re fighting a war against her, though.

The response:

I repeated what I wrote to you to the Inquisitor, and I am certain she laughed at me. She did tell me, though, that I could proceed, but with caution.

I also believe I have decided what I might get for her. Thank you for your help.

The Seeker frowns as she closes the file she is holding in her hands. “All that and Solas did not even tell us what he got for the Inquisitor. I would have liked to know.” 

“You were really invested in this, huh?” Varric asks. Admittedly, he's been getting pretty involved himself. “Maybe he just doesn’t want us to spoil it for her. There’s still a few days to choke it out of him and send a bird to her.”

“I just hope it is a good gift. Perhaps I am far too interested, considering what Solas plans to do. But we are fighting against him, and I pray that will be good enough." She pauses, as if making a confession: "I have much in common with the Inquisitor." She gets up to wander the room, staring out the window into the streets of the city. “We both believe in the importance of our own action, and trust in our own ability to do right. Yet she is a faithless woman and cannot take the comfort I do in the guidance of the Maker. Even though she put a brave face on things, I saw that she was in constant fear of disaster, despair. She once told me it energized her to be one step from the edge, but it terrified her, too, as if there was no line between those things. From what I saw of the two of them, her relationship with Solas somehow afforded her a small amount of peace. To see that ruined…I am angry for her sake.”

The Seeker looks at the floor and let out a sigh. “I like them both—I supposed liked, on Solas’s part— individually. And I liked them as a couple, though I at first thought them odd together. And, despite everything, I am sentimental,” she says. “The Inquisitor and I are both women who have dedicated much of our lives to being hit in our faces repeatedly. To see Solas look at her the way he did…it was heartening. I do not want to believe that was all some act.” There is a strange pain in her voice, and she stares more resolutely out the window, her face away from Varric.

“Seeker…” Varric starts. He feels like he should say something to comfort her. Varric’s good with people, but not necessarily with Cassandra. The only thing he knows for sure how to evoke from her without presenting her with soft-core pornography is pure, unmitigated rage. 

Cassandra laughs. “Don’t concern yourself with me. I had my own great love for a time.” She seems as if she has resigned herself to the cruelty of fate. Varric had never heard Cassandra talk about it, but Cole had said the dead man’s name before—was he called Regaylan? Something within Varric hurts for the Seeker, and he realizes that the pang comes from empathy. Though he counts himself lucky that Bianca still walks the earth, Varric has accepted that ‘we’ll get by’ has come to entirely replace ‘one day, maybe.’ He wonders if Lavellan still holds that hope for herself and Solas. Cassandra finishes, “Perhaps it is silly of me, but I want the Inquisitor to have her happy ending.”

Varric can’t help but agree with her, a dash of bittersweet pragmatism flavoring his concurrence: “And all of us with her. Wouldn’t that really be something if love could save the world?” 

Hey, Chuckles. The Seeker and I hope you picked out a good gift for the Inquisitor. She deserves something nice.

Listen, the two of us just want you to know that if this works out for the best and you don’t do whatever you’re going to do, that we’ll probably forgive you eventually. The way I see it, right now you’re doing wrong by most people who exist equally, ourselves included. A notable exception to this is the Inquisitor, who’s getting the worst of it. If she has it in her to eventually get past this, I’m all for doing the same, and Cassandra will at least try.  

You’re not the first friend that I’ve had that up and decided that killing a bunch of people would be the only way to make things better, so maybe I’m a little numbed to this stuff. Or not. But as far as I know, you haven’t done anything too bad yet. I sure hope it stays that way.

I’m not just saying this because I want you to stop trying to tear down the Veil (though I would be lying if I told you that wasn’t part of it): If you really care about Lavellan, you shouldn’t just let it keep going like it is right now. I know you don’t want my opinion, but take it from me, living letter to letter is no way to really love someone. I know what you're trying at. No matter how small it is, the fact that you still are talking to her means there's some part of you that wants to give all this doom and gloom shit up and go back to her, that knows there's a whole world waiting for you if you change your mind. Maybe you don’t get to write the ending to this, but I think it’s up to you to set the tone for it. 

Of course Solas does not reply. Varric figures that there isn't much more for him to say.

Chapter Text

Long weeks have passed since Solas promised Lavellan that he would not further attempt to sabotage or take advantage of their relationship, and while she doesn’t trust him, their letters have been strangely genial and sanguine. He’d even sent her a birthday gift.

The air is dark and the music is low in the trendy Halamshiral cigar lounge, and Lavellan is certain that whatever is in the air is exactly the sort of toxic gas that was banned from use on enemy combatants in the Antiva Convention. “Vivenne, I’ve had cigars before. This isn’t cigar smoke,” Lavellan almost coughs as she waves the wafting billows away from her face. “And is that a dead gurn on the dais?” She motions towards a rather gory art installation that dominates the center of the room. It probably would have smelled atrocious if the room wasn’t saturated with the stench of smoke.

Lavellan knows why Vivienne has chosen the location, however. Elves that didn’t have the distinct privilege of being the Inquisitor were not allowed into the establishment: there is no chance of being eavesdropped upon by agents of Fen’Harel in the dark and velvet-lined room. This sits strangely with Lavellan, especially when she catches the human noble patrons peering at her large, pointed ears.

The elegant mage twirls a long holder between her fingers, and takes a drag from the finer roll of tobacco she has at the end. She is wearing a dark red gown with a structured, beaded bodice and does not look as if she has spent the past few weeks stewing over magical quandaries. “That piece is called The Reluctance of Flesh, darling. Don’t you know anything about the art of the members of the Cumberland School? The current of thought is becoming quite popular among more fashionable crowds.”

“Ah, yes,” Lavellan ventures, “The Cumberland School, characterized by its progenitors’ aims to frame the motions of nature as the motions occur without the manipulation of man. The rotting gurn corpse is but a testament to transformation and destruction: eventually, the flesh does give way, aesthetically ceding to the unyielding march of time. Critics say that it’s a commentary on industrialization in the Marches.”

That’s not terrible, Inquisitor,” Vivienne says, sounding very nearly impressed. The note fades as she continues, “You could almost fool someone who has absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I try,” Lavellan says with a small smile. She briefly considers asking the servers for a glass of whiskey, but remembers that she is still not drinking. Her resolution to stay away from alcohol has gone strangely well. She knows she needs a clear head, she tells herself. “So. How have you been, Vivienne?”

“How very kind of you to ask, my dear. I’m doing well enough. One of Bastien’s idiot cousins has ceased his pursuit of me—I hadn’t even donned the Cap of Acceptance for my beloved’s funerary soiree when the fool began his propositions.”

“I’m glad he’s no longer a bother…?” Lavellan ventures.

“Yes, quite. Bastien’s younger brother, on the other hand—a pleasant fellow, bright, was willed several estates by Bastien, recently widowed in a pottery kiln explosion…He’s invited me to a wyvern hunt to commiserate. Hopefully we will be done working by then.” Vivienne gives a barely audible sigh. There is an odd sadness in Vivienne’s voice: Lavellan believes that as much as she had allowed herself to, the First Enchanter had honestly loved the Duke. Now she plans to act from political necessity and for once it seems to bring her no joy. Vivienne rights herself and continues, “Poor Heloise. I liked her well enough. I told her that craftwork was beneath her station, and she thought I was joking. She would still be here today if she had only listened,” she shakes her head.

“A tragedy,” Lavellan says, and hoping that she’s read Vivienne’s intent correctly, adds, “I know your support will mean much to her aggrieved husband.”

Vivienne gives a slight “Mm,” and Lavellan is unsure as to whether or not she has offended the mage somehow. Regardless, Vivienne continues. “You should look at your own prospects, Inquisitor. Having a liaison within the nobility could only benefit you. If you ever disband your Inquisition, you’ll need to get a foothold in the Game somehow. I know you have an estate in Kirkwall, and probably some claim to parts of Wycome, but a title in the Marches that doesn’t confer ‘head of state’ is hardly a title in the real court. As does my magic, your race prevents the possibility of marriage, but there are many in the upper echelons of power that would simply die for the chance to call the Inquisitor their mistress.”

Lavellan laughs. “Vivienne, while I’m beginning to actually enjoy the Game, I don’t like politics enough to take them to bed with me. I like to keep my affairs separate from my affairs."

The mage quirks a highly manicured brow. “Oh darling, we all know that just isn’t true.” Lavellan shrinks in shame slightly, knowing that Vivienne is right. Vivienne thinks for a moment as she takes a small draw of her cigarette through her holder. “I knew Solas had to be something more than an apostate.”

“Because a mere apostate could never have measured up to you in the way that he did."

Vivienne either doesn’t notice the slight dig or doesn’t care. “Precisely. I was also wary of his lack of personal history—didn’t that strike you as odd at all?”

“He told me some things about himself. They were lies. Or rather, half-truths. He would sometimes just omit context, and I would fill it in with what I expected.” Lavellan says. Via mail, she’s still trying to get Solas to admit that he’d lied about his number of sexual partners as part of his cover, but he’s holding his line on the original figure he’d provided before Lavellan had learned that he was thousands of years old. There was no way Lavellan would accept that she’d slept with three more people than a man who has been around for innumerable ages. “Because how could I expect anything resembling the reality?”

“You couldn’t have. But you didn’t have to trust him. I’m sure you’ve heard enough on the subject.” Vivienne pauses and adds, “Do you think our Solas would be the jealous type? If you took a paramour—"

Lavellan decides it’s time to change the subject. “So, Vivienne. How is The Operation proceeding?” This is the matter that they have come to discuss.

“Better than we could have ever hoped for,” Vivienne says, a smug but wary pride seeping from her voice. “I had thought it impossible, and would have rather left it to the impossible. I would strongly advise against this sort of thing normally, but with what is at stake…” She scrunches her nose and raises a corner of her mouth disdainfully. Vivienne has always understood necessity, even if she tended to have her own idea about what necessity was. “I suppose this is why it is best that I’m involved. An iota of restraint and reason goes a long way when tampering with the dangerous mysteries of the arcane.”

“Harding says you brought templars to the site.”

“Indeed I did, dear,” Vivienne says. “I’m working with a known blood mage, and I intend to take precautions for my safety and the safety of the project.”

Lavellan raises a brow, worried that Vivienne’s conservative stance might jeopardize the work. “And Merrill is fine with that?”

“She doesn’t need to be. The templars have become integral to our success—we’ve been using their powers to negate certain barriers within the matrices of the enchantments.”

“It sounds like you know what you’re doing, Madame du Fer. So we will be able to deactivate the eluvian network?” Lavellan asks. Such a feat would destroy one of Solas’s biggest assets and cripple his operations.

Vivienne nods. “We believe so. We could do that and more now if we so wished, though both dear Merrill and I need to work through further safeguards to maintain our holds. It is my job to ensure that we are thorough.”

“More?” The Inquisitor leans back in the cushioned booth. “Explain what ‘more’ is and how that’s possible.”

“I can tell you what ‘more’ is, dear, but I hardly think you’ll be able to understand the ‘how’ of the matter.” Vivienne takes a drag of her cigarette, and her eye contact breaks for but a second. Lavellan is absolutely certain of the source of the strange falter.

“Oh, I’m sure I couldn’t pick up the intricacies, but I do have some base understanding of theory,” Lavellan says. “Maybe you could simplify it all for me?”

Vivienne knows what Lavellan is trying to do, and rolls her eyes with a sigh. She decides to give up while she is ahead: “Don’t you dare try to bait me, Inquisitor. Even I must admit that Merrill is the one you would want to ask. I have yet to apply my practical knowledge to the matter, but from what she claims, we should have it ready in a matter of weeks. She gleaned an entire theoretical framework from her…unsavory sources long ago and has done well in extrapolating from that. She’s more clever than I first gave her credit for. Much more clever. I do not like working with her, though I see the necessity of doing so—take my word for it, Inquisitor. She could be very dangerous, if she wanted to be, or, more likely, if she falls to negligence.” Lavellan is under the impression that Merrill has already learned a painful lesson about negligence. She won’t bother arguing with Vivienne, though.

“I see your point, but I want to know what she found.”

“When we were trying to practice safeguarding the inert eluvians we’d obtained from being reactivated, which Solas will undoubtedly attempt to do, Merrill noticed something about the activation energy needed and spoke of playing ‘remote locksmith’ by forging keys,” explains Vivienne.

“And that means…?”

Vivienne grins slightly, and it looks like she is smiling despite herself. “Darling, if Merrill really has stumbled onto what she thinks she has, we may be able to take control of the entire eluvian network for ourselves.”

Lavellan sits at her desk at Skyhold, a letter in hand. She looks at the small potted shrub that Solas had gifted her for her thirtieth birthday and cannot help but feel confused and conflicted over the note from him that had come with it, which she keeps propped at the juncture of two of its branches:

Vhenan,

Do not worry. I paid gold to have this lyrata plant sent from a gardener and thus have not touched it myself. One would hope it would live a long and happy life under your auspices.

Best wishes to you on your birthday.

Solas

She wonders if plants too will die if the Veil is torn down. Probably, considering Solas’s track record with horticulture. Maybe just plants would die, triggering a different and more prolonged apocalypse. Lavellan herself hasn’t killed the ficus just yet.

She sets about the task of opening Solas’s newest letter to her:

Adahlen,

I don't know why you're so fixated on this matter. And are you seriously asking me if the number I gave you precludes spirits I have "known?" I thought I had made it abundantly clear that such matters are not so simplistic. When I told you that certain things had always been easier for me in the Fade, I meant candidness and emotional honesty, not sex.

Forms of intimacy that you or even I might understand or pursue are foreign to even spirits created from emotions one might associate with such actions. Unless, of course, they have been warped by physical minds into manifestations of mortal Desire, thus transformed into what you might call a demon. Naturally, it is dangerous to engage in congress with such a being.

Despite the obvious perils and somewhat unsavory nature of these Desire spirits, they can indeed be conversed with safely. As any spirit does, a Desire demon can divulge vast amounts of knowledge to those who might seek it, though it is almost certainly offered so freely only as a means of enticement. Still, one can learn much if one listens cautiously. The words spirits of Desire impart and the experiences they convey are often uniquely applicable to physical matters.

I did, naturally, have to practice administering the use of such knowledge. Unlike my painting, I had no choice but to do so with women I wished to impress. But, much like my painting, I wish to believe that I became more than proficient and had developed my own skill and technique by the time I met you.

“Really, Solas? Really?” Lavellan leaves the letter on the desk to go to the balcony. She very much needs to take an incredibly deep breath and shake her head.

I suppose this is a rather embarrassing thing to admit.

I know we have agreed to omit more somber matters from our discussions. I cannot say that I do not appreciate the lighter tone these letters have taken recently. However, something has been on my mind as of late. It is in part an explanation and in part a question.

It may make you unhappy to hear, but I do what I do in part for you, or your eventual memory: I hope that the world I make will be characterized in full by freedom and opportunity. While thanks to you I have realized that at least some are not as alienated from their true selves as I may have believed, this world is inherently limiting and caging to both the minds and bodies of those who live here, elves and otherwise. How many people such as yourself wallowed and wallow still, on the cusp of civilization, dispossessed and despondent? It is my fault and my duty to remedy. If there might be anyone at all such as you in this world suffering in binding poverty, as a slave in Tevinter, or under the Qun, I would have those fetters removed from them and be burned clean from the earth.

Yet if someone such as you believes this world to be worth fighting for, I must question my ends. What do you see here, Inquisitor, that is so valuable? You were miserable at this world’s behest once. I will not change my mind, but I do seek to understand.

Solas

Lavellan has enough time before her next meeting with the Commander to write a response:

Solas,

There is a lot wrong with this place, and truthfully I can understand you wanting a blank slate conducive to good civilization.

But are you really questioning why I fight for the world? You ask that as if there aren’t millions of lives depending upon me. I have a responsibility to make sure that potentially literally everyone doesn’t fucking die.

But as for my own ends, I took a while to think about them when this war began in earnest. As an elf, I had to ask myself if I wanted this world because I had done well in it, because I had somehow escaped my station and ingrained myself in its ruling class. But that’s not it.

I think I would have fought for this world still if I had been given the opportunity as a Dalish discontent. When I was sixteen my friend Kelleth and I killed our first bear to earn our vallaslin. We could have settled on rams or coyotes or something small, but we didn’t because I was a grandiose teenaged idiot and he didn’t want to back down. The two of us nearly died, but we killed it. When we were done binding our wounds we left the carcass to walk a while. Everything was calm but a light wind and our hearts still pounding in our chests and we sat at a bluff overlooking a river valley and caught our breaths. It was late in the day in late summer, and the light hit the river and made it look like it was all lit up and the sound of crickets sang forth and sank into the foliage so that the same buzz seemed to echo through the whole world. We were there and we were alive and all of everything was ahead of us, even if we didn’t really know what all of everything was. We could imagine that it would be good things. And maybe we were lucky to be able to think that.

I’ve had a lot of little moments of hope like that. You were right by my side for many of them: I felt much the same dancing in your arms after our victory at the Winter Palace. There were many troubles to come, and I knew that, but our future was there and that was undoubtedly a happy idea. And while that feeling is here I can’t see this world as inherently broken. Even if I don’t know how, it can and will be made better. I want to build that better world out of the one we have. I want to build it with the knowledge of what it is like to be weak and powerless and scared.

I want the same for freed slaves and alienage elves and human peasants and casteless dwarves and Tevinter soporati and Tal-Vashoth and mages who spent their lives locked afraid in the Circles and templars who shake sick and afraid from lyrium withdrawal. I want the same for commoners of all races and kindhearted nobles and priests who have tried to use their power to do good already, and for magisters who have risked everything to stem the tide of decadence and cruelness in their nation.

There certainly will be conflict and maybe sometimes things will get worse before they get better. But I like to think we’ve taken the first steps. You’re right when you accuse me of not being as pragmatic as I like to think I am. If my overall dream is too idealistic, I can still use it to accomplish something while I'm here. Perhaps my arrogance beguiles me into believing that I can have a hand in truly changing the world for the better, but I wouldn’t be able to start if I didn’t think I could.

But, in short, I see hope here and people who deserve life and dignity and justice. I fight for the future of those who live in this world now, and I won’t have their tomorrows be denied. Yours, of course, included.

I hope that helps you a little,

Inquisitor Lavellan

She uses her title because it is the capacity in which she fights.

Lavellan leaves the letter sticking out from under a loose stone on the ramparts to be found by that day’s patrolman who she knows to be a spy, and then heads to Cullen’s office to discuss the retinue of troops needed for the Inquisition’s next move. Vivienne’s news about the eluvian network has all but changed the strategy of the battle against Solas. She knows that they must select the parties for the impending venture carefully.

 Lavellan is in the Grand Hall seeing off a visiting Antivan Grand Cleric who has been attempting to dissolve her city’s alienage and use Divine Victoria’s rhetoric to help integrate the elves into civil society. It is a project in which Lavellan is interested, and she wishes she could afford to focus more time on it. She'd be able to if she didn't have to deal with the mess that is Solas.

“I’ll write the president of the university on your behalf, Mother Leona. If you’ve already convinced the city’s lycees and finishing schools to accept elves, there’s no reason he should deny entry to those qualified elves that the Chantry sponsors. I’m sure I can spin something about the importance of educated community leaders in any population,” Lavellan says, and the old woman nods and smiles.

“And a cousin of mine is on faculty. I could ensure that he delivers the letter to the president by hand,” Josephine follows up. “The Inquisition and Divine Victoria appreciate your support. Ah! But I have not yet shown you the library. It is small still, but we have many rare tomes—“ playing the ever-energized host, Josephine herds her countrywoman away towards the stairs.

After the Grand Cleric is cleared, a letter wafts down from above in front of Lavellan and the Inquisitor checks to see where it has come from. All of the second-story walkways are empty, and Lavellan sighs and picks the letter up from the floor. She peers around to make sure no one is looking, and carefully uses her teeth to rip one of the shorter ends of the envelope off. Lavellan slides the letter inside out and clumsily unfolds it:

Adahlen,

Your sentiment is noted and very deeply appreciated.

If all went your way, I do not know what I would even do with the future that you would so mercifully bestow upon me.

It is odd to think of. I have lived solely on my duty since I awoke from my uthenera, and before that my sole purpose was for centuries to fight as a revolutionary against the corrupt decadence and cruelty of Arlathan, a civilization that no longer exists. How would I even begin in a new life? I am not of this world and henceforth do not have a place here.

I do enjoy the quiet. I suppose I could withdraw myself to study and perhaps vary my areas of expertise. There are many things I would like to read upon before entering into discourse with the spirits. I could likely paint, or maybe try my hand once more at gardening. Maybe I would start with succulents. I have heard that those are hard to kill. I doubt these things could fully occupy me, but I have always found such things to be pleasant diversions.

Alas, I should not give myself over to such daydreams.

Is the fig plant still alive?

Solas

Lavellan sighs slightly. Has Solas ruminated on what he would like of life or does he mourn what he has resigned himself to losing? It could be either. Something else bothers her about the letter, and it does not take her long to realize what.

Lavellan places her response on a bench near the garden, along a path highly frequented by busy pages running back and forth:

Solas,

So, you want to sit around, read, paint, and garden. What you’ve described is "retirement." I don’t think you’re allowed to do that when you’re immortal. It’s infinitely better than your current plans, though, so I won't keep you from it.

You do know that if you returned, I would take you back, right? Maybe not immediately, and of course I would still be upset with you for a while. But I’d like to think that we’re not irreparably broken, and that our love for one another can exist separate from a dire state of crisis. We cared for one another before our emotions got tangled up in a war over the fate of the world, and we can care for one another afterward. I know it won’t ever be the same, necessarily, but I would very much want to be in your life if you would have that.

But I suppose that’s only a ‘what-if,’ and neither here nor there.

Yes, the plant is still alive,

Adahlen

Lavellan sighs as she walks the hallways of her castle. She cannot imagine what a life with Solas would be like, especially not after their period of war. Even if some semblance of a normal relationship could be salvaged, there would always be the knowledge of what had happened, the lies he had told, and the memory of what he had intended to do.

Admittedly, Lavellan had some trouble imagining such a future before, back when she had believed she’d fallen in love with some strange apostate a mere twenty years her senior. She’d never so much as considered bonding or marriage with anyone before in her life, and was struggling to compose a way to ask Solas if he wanted to continue their relationship after the world was saved and he had no reason to stick around. Then, of course, Solas had broken up with her and vanished with no trace shortly thereafter, but that didn’t change the fact that she had grappled with strange ideas of domesticity for some time.

Would they have to share a room all the time? What if he wanted her to quit her job as the Inquisitor and live with him in the woods or something? Would there be some sort of commitment ceremony eventually? Should she invite her clan to that? Would Solas be all right with Dalish stuff? Did she really want the Dalish stuff herself? What if they got sick of one another after a decade? And oh, Void, no, what if they started discussing children?

A laugh bubbles up out of nowhere from Lavellan, and to her embarrassment, a passing scribe turns to look at her as she giggles at nothing.

She could probably ask the same questions now, if Solas showed up at the Inquisition’s doorstep to surrender himself to her mercy and forgiveness. There would just be more things to ask: Would the man from another world and another time truly accept a place with her?

Lavellan pushes the thoughts from her head. She would likely never see Solas again. At least not until some terrible crisis arises, anyways.

The next letter from Solas comes in the regular mail delivered to Lavellan’s desk. She waits for the courier to leave before she opens it. It is a bright fall morning, and Lavellan is certain she is not misreading the letter, but she reads it four times over to make sure what is on the page is truly there:

Adahlen,

As always, your optimism is heartening. Yet you are right: the matter is neither here nor there. I shall not be returning to you. I should not have engaged with such thoughts myself.

Perhaps, however, it is more accurate to say that I do not intend to return to you permanently. This brings me to the next matter.

I am not quite certain how to ask you what I intend to ask you next. It is undoubtedly a favor, and you have all the reason in the world to refuse me. This request is a reversal of a position that I have long held as being of paramount importance:

I would like to meet with you in person. To make it sound like even worse of an idea, I would prefer it to be alone, and in an informal and neutral setting—I would perhaps define such a meeting as ‘intimate,’ but the two of us need not touch. I wish only to talk. I know not about what, but it would bring me more happiness than I deserve to look upon your face once again. Much has been on my mind lately, and such a rendezvous would afford me some small peace, I believe.

This is something that I want desperately of you, and I am selfish enough to request it. I am aware of the sheer wrongness of my invitation. I do not wish to hurt you worse than I already have, vhenan, yet I extend to you a perfect opportunity to have more suffering inflicted upon you. You would be the final arbiter as to whether or not we would meet, but it would be as if you were opting to drink poison freely offered by my hand. I would still be culpable, at least in part, for whatever might befall you.

I am willing to accept whatever pain this circumstance may impart upon me. I should not ask the same of you, and yet I do. I also would understand if you passed on my offer out of a lack of trust. I have done little to garner such, and theoretically could pose a great danger to your person if I was so inclined.

There is, in actuality, little reason for you to agree to my request. Still, I would be honored if you would entertain the possibility of seeing me.

Solas

Lavellan stares blankly at the page. Her first instinct is that it’s a trap, and her next is to laugh at him and write back and tell him that it’s an awful idea. She wonders what has bid him to change his mind, and is worried that something is terribly, terribly wrong. Lavellan takes a piece of paper begins to write a response:

Solas,

Your idea is an awful one, but I want to see you, too.

I make my own schedule, so I’m available whenever. We can figure something out.

I’ll see you soon,

Adahlen

Lavellan knows that meeting with Solas is more than a possibility. It is an opportunity.

Chapter Text

Lavellan sits at the counter of the tavern, hardly listening to the elven innkeeper as he tries to make pleasant by chatting with her. Her mind is occupied as she waits for her company, but she half-entertains his small talk.

Part of one of the innkeeper’s pointed ears is cut off and he speaks like he’s from some urban area. “The Pigeon’s Post’s the first elf-owned inn in the whole arling, you know. Never thought I’d have the gold for something like this, no. Thought’d be lucky to rent a stall to sell secondhands near the alienage gates back in the city.”

She peers towards the door. Solas is almost an hour late, and Lavellan is beginning to believe that he has decided against attending their meeting. Perhaps he had balked at the idea of coming together in a public place as she insisted, or perhaps he was just terrible in every single way.

“Which city?” she asks, masking her growing irritation and resentment with a half-hearted geniality. Lavellan does not have her longsword with her. She has not had time to take to the yards to practice in the past month, and feels silly carrying a near-useless weapon. She briefly reflects on what Deshanna said about knowing a losing battle, but pushes it from her head. She is dressed down in simple clothing, and is fairly certain that no one in the pub has recognized her as the Inquisitor. Lavellan likes the anonymity. It’ll be less embarrassing when she eventually melts down over being stood up, she thinks.

“All of ‘em,” he says with an odd pride, “or near. Born in Highever, parents took a contract to work in Denerim when I was a boy, but we all hopped to Amaranthine right before the Blight hit on account of all the riots. Did us a fat amount of good with avoiding darkspawn, though—Amaranthine got sacked by a hoard hardly a year past when the big one got put down. My sister caught the taint from it and went to the Wardens, but she’s with the Inquisition now after that mess out in Orlais. The Warden gave her her Joining before leaving command, you know. There’s my family’s claim to fame. Not the sort of person you meet every day. Want something stronger than tea, ma’am? It’s starting to get dark.”

It’s early fall but still warm, and massive bay windows are opened all along the side of the tavern. People are outside in the dying light of the dusk and cheering as they toss horseshoes. A friendly buzzing warmth fills the room, radiated outwards from its patrons. Lavellan is not the only one of the Dalish in the room: A group of hunters from some unknown clan is busy being swindled out of their pelts by an unscrupulous dwarven diamondback dealer in the far corner. A lyrist strums some song Lavellan is near certain originated with Maryden, and to it a human man and a looming horned woman, presumably Tal-Vashoth, do an awkward step dance amidst the floor of the crowded bar. They hold each other close and look happy, and Lavellan can’t help but resent them.

“Nothing stronger, thank you,” Lavellan says. She is still avoiding imbibition, even though the call of whiskey tempts her. “But I wouldn’t mind another kettle. So how did you make the gold for the inn? It would have to be a lot for a place like this.”

“Ghenna, more hot water!” he calls. “Awful presumptuous question, ma’am, but I’ll spill—when the templars and the mages started with their war, my brothers and me, we had an idea. The mail from out of town stopped coming because of the fighting, and we thought, well, why couldn’t we take letters places? Coming from an alienage, you’re good at sneaking around when you gotta be. So we started a courier business to all of Fereldan. We and the people working for us were only ones that would take anything from Amaranthine all the way to Redcliff or any of the little towns like Honnleath or what have you, and when that all slowed down, we contracted with the Inquisition for a bit—mostly ran supplies between their camps in tricky areas while that lasted. When things settled we closed doors because we’d made our fortunes and wanted to try our hands at other trades. I’ve got this, ‘n’ my two brothers been run a brewery out of South Reach. I think it’s all looking up, even if their ale tastes like piss. Lost my ear while I was a courier, you know. Happened at a bridge checkpoint I tried to sneak through. One of them Red Templars got in a lucky slice before I could get through and get out.”

Lavellan wonders if the barkeeper notices her getting sourer and sourer as she waits, and if her ill disposition is the reason he’s talking so much. She must be a sorry sight to garner his special attention. She decides to at least humor the barman, who means well and deserves patrons less moody than her: “Delivering mail is an important duty,” Lavellan forces an appreciative laugh. Almost bitterly, she adds: “Brings the people together.”

The innkeeper nods. “That’s what I’ve always said. Especially with the war. Not many people knew what was going to happen the next day. Had to find some way to get in touch. I won’t deny turning a profit on it, but I think we did some good.” He places the newly-delivered kettle of tea on the bar. “Should be steeping still, give it a minute, if you would. So, now a presumptuous question for you, ma’am: how’d you lose your hand? Noticed your left. You see a lot of fake limbs growing up in an alienage.”

Lavellan gives one of the half-truths that she’s grown skilled at telling: “Inquisition work.”

“Didn’t know you were Inquisition, ma’am! Still regard your lot well, good pay, good people. So, you’re a Dalish—Dalish? A Dalish?—“ he struggles on the proper term, and motions at his face, presumably in reference to Lavellan’s vallaslin.

Lavellan shuts down the confusion brusquely. “Dalish.”

“Yes, so as I was. You’re Dalish. What do you think of her? Since she’s one of yours? More than she’s one of mine, even, though I think we’d all claim her, us elves and all.” 

Lavellan raises a brow. “The Inquisitor?”

“Who else?” 

“Ah,” Lavellan shrugs. “She does all right. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be doing what I do.” She glances at the door again, hoping to see a familiar figure. Nothing. She suppresses a ‘fuck you, Solas.’

“Just all right?” the innkeeper asks with an almost confused laugh. “Harsh appraisal, ma’am. Something the people don’t know?”

“When you’re up close, it’s clear that the Inquisitor has no idea what she’s doing a lot of the time,” Lavellan explains, “and that’s sometimes very frightening when lives are on the line.”

“What with the things she deals with—according to the songs, that is—does anyone really know what’s going on?“

“She should know better,” Lavellan curses herself. It’s near an hour past when Solas promised to arrive. Personal and professional disappointment mix, and she angrily remembers that there is no true separation between the two aspects of her life. “She’s the Inquisitor. It’s her damned job to know.”

There is quiet for a moment. “You’re waiting for someone who’s not coming, aren’t you?” the innkeeper says. “I’m sorry.”

Lavellan would normally snap at the assumption about her private life, but all she can do is sigh. “It’s fine. I should know better. He’s a complete and total jackass.” She wonders if Solas will take any more of her letters. She wonders if he knows, and that’s why he hasn’t come.

Lavellan digs in her coin purse with her good hand and puts a gold piece on the table. “Thank you for the conversation. Keep the change,” she tells the innkeeper, wondering if there is a carriage that she can catch in the next village that will ride through the night to take her back home to Skyhold. If Solas is not coming, she has no reason to be there. She would much rather receive news of the night’s operations in War Room when she would arrive in the early hours of the morning than choke back tears of rage and worry in some strange inn. She knows now that the night will be messy.

Standing to abandon her steeping tea, she spins to walk out the door. Not halfway to the exit Lavellan finds herself face to face with the person she had been waiting for so long to see. He is dressed in a tattered jumper and worn padded vest suited to a wayward elven apostate, but as always, Solas carries himself like a prince, like a god.

Lavellan feels a smile slip across her face and a laugh well in her fluttering stomach as her knees fight not to buckle. She won't let herself act like a lovestruck idiot over him, she promises. He is even more handsome than he was in the Fade, Lavellan thinks, and if this is some trap Solas has laid for her, it’s one that she has happily and deservedly fallen into. “You’re late,” she says, and the accusation comes out softer than she intends. Lavellan has until the end of days to be angry with him, and cannot waste time on that now. Candles illuminate the tavern, but the dusk’s light still pours through the windows making the whole of the world glow in a gentle bath of blushing purples and oranges. The air has become quiet, but not entirely silent and still as everything reverberates with an indescribably subtle tremble. 

Some of Solas’s divine composure dissolves as he bows his head, an oddly sheepish grin gracing his lips and raising his cheeks. The gentle contortion exacerbates the faint lines of aging that are evident around his mouth and eyes, and something inside Lavellan aches from how tired he looks. Solas answers her accusation, “Ah, yes. Would you believe me if I told you that I overslept? I am rather ashamed.” 

“Of course you did.” In a moment the rest of Lavellan's resolve to remain disaffected dissolves, and her arms are wrapped around his neck and their bodies are pressed together in a tangle of limbs, three real and one fake, there in the middle of the inn. She is afraid that Solas might vanish, or that the world will fall out from around them to reveal a Faded nothingness. So much for not needing to touch—she clutches him tight to her as if her grasp can prevent her reality from slipping away, as if she can hold him in her arms and have him stay. Lavellan can feel Solas breathe and his heart beat and she can smell his scent, old books and the warm crackling effervescence of an autumn bonfire, and he is solid, and he is there, burying his face in her hair and tightly clasping her to his chest as if she is his everything.

At once Lavellan is exhilarated and terrified.

Chapter Text

The countryside outdoors has gone dark and the chill of the night winds rasps through baring branches, but the room upstairs in the inn is warm, decked with deep-colored tapestries that trap the heat and luminous oil lamps that reflect bright off the glass panes of the windows, which hold at bay the drum of autumn rain. 

It’s certainly a comfortable setting, and Lavellan wonders if she can stay in the hazy post-coital glow of the moment forever. In the almost gold light of the lamps, she lies on her side, the last of her heavy breathing subsiding as she rests propped upon a pile of pillows on one side and her prosthesis-free left arm on the other. Her lover is quiet, lying between more pillows and her body with his eyes shut, his own body moving upon hers with each inhale and exhale. Solas grins slightly as Lavellan runs the fingers of her right hand down his torso, raking them through the light trail of hair that leads from his chest downwards. She is unsure if she is imagining a greater number of greys interspersing with his elusive natural color or not, or if such a thing is even possible. 

Solas draws a long sighing breath and finally breaks his quiet. “I am surprised,” he says as he opens his eyes, as grey and cool as storm clouds, to look up at her. “I truthfully did not expect to wind up in bed with you upon suggesting that we reconvene. I would have thought you would have regarded me with more caution.” 

Lavellan laughs airily, her stomach fluttering against his side. Both of their bodies are slightly softer than they had been the last time they laid together, muscle tone eroded for want of the exercise of adventure. Lavellan finds Solas as absolutely gorgeous as she always has, and he looks at her with the old amazement in his eyes, even if she is missing a hand, her stomach is no longer quite flat, and perennial dark circles have begun to form under her eyes. “We talked for, what, an hour, before I dragged you up here? I thought I did a very good job of containing my enthusiasm.”

“Your enthusiasm certainly was noted, and appreciated.”

“Says the man who used magic to tear up my smallclothes in his haste to get them off of me.”

Solas immediately shifts in the covers, pulling away to to face her. Some alarm crosses his face as if he is nervous about the prospect of displeasing her. He very quickly says, “Ir abelas, I can fix them, most likely, if you are upset over—” Things, Lavellan supposes, are already tenuous without consternation over ruined underwear. She does not need reminding of that.

Again, Lavellan laughs through her trepidation. She is unable to help the bubbling of genuine happiness in his presence. “Over a brassiere? Halani-ma, Solas, considering everything, do you know how silly that seems?” She strokes his side to assure him that he is firmly within her good graces and she finds the intersection of two scars with her fingers.

The fresher one she remembers Solas receiving when the staff-blade of a Venatori mage pierced his armor in the western Wastes, and the other, a long-faded remnant of some other cruel blow, had been there the first time she had seen him bare. As he relaxes and rejoins her with a similar gesture, Lavellan idly wonders how old the scar is and how it had come to mar his ribcage. It occurs to her that this has been the first time that she and Solas have slept together since she learned the truth of his nature. This time, she is a liar too. Lost entirely in Solas’s physicality, Lavellan had not thought on the matter while they had made love, and she does not want to think on it now as she lay at his side, close enough to feel him breathe.

“It does seem quite absurd,” Solas concedes, the corners of his lips upturning. He looks upon her with something resembling a soft scrutiny, and the little smile fades. He settles his head on her left arm, which is still stretched out across the pillow as he pulls the rest of her body closer to him across the covers by her waist.

“There’s a problem?” Lavellan asks, wariness lurking beneath the intended compassion.

“In truth? I would much rather that such a small matter be our only concern this evening,” Solas answers. “But that is not the case. As always, to play pretend even for a short time would be foolish of us.”

Lavellan sighs. She knows that playing pretend is extremely foolish, but she had been attempting to do just that. She wants to castigate Solas for bringing their war to bed with him, and then remembers that she should castigate herself, but knows that it would be useless. It is precisely his point—she had already been bracing herself for some sort of problem.

“Then let’s not play pretend.” Lavellan says. It’s a cruel stipulation with which she herself will not comply.

Solas thinks for a moment, seemingly unsatisfied by her offer. “I suppose, from a certain perspective, that there is a particular bittersweet romance in the act of making love to one’s nemesis.”

“’Sleeping with the enemy,’ literally. Do your henchmen know about us?” Lavellan asks. “Other than the ones that have gotten into our mail, I mean. I recall you accusing me of scandalizing those.”

“Henchmen?” Solas sounds offended.

“What? I would want henchmen.”

Solas narrows his eyes, but gives them a nearly imperceptible roll as the vestiges of an exasperated grin return to his face. It is a welcome sight for Lavellan. He is handsome and smiling and everything is wrong. She tries not to think on it. “You already have henchmen, vhenan. You simply do not call them that.”

“Fine, fine. But do you know how bad it would be for the Inquisition’s public relations if I called our soldiers ‘henchmen?’”

“I would assume that it would merely be confusing to most,” Solas counters bemusedly. He turns his head to lay a small kiss the stretch of skin he is laying on. “Though perhaps I am not the best person to hear advice about maintaining appearances from. I did, and still do, after all, allow myself to be called the ‘Dread Wolf.’ It is an appellation with few positive connotations.” As if to underscore his ancient title, Solas nips at the place where he had just kissed. The pressure of his teeth gently bearing into her shoulder evokes an involuntary hum from Lavellan’s throat.

“Ma melava dirth, Solas: Just answer the question. Do your people gossip about your personal life?”

“I haven’t thought to determine such a thing. Or, for that matter, ask. Though I assume not.”

Lavellan affects a fake pout. “That’s no fun at all. I guess your henchmen can all be surprised when you bring me as your plus-one to one of their wedding receptions.” 

As always, Solas seems half-sad, and Lavellan does not want to think about the particularities of why. She wonders if she has ever given him any true respite from his sadness, or if she has only ever served to make it worse. Lavellan reaches down to scratch his thigh in an attempt at giving him some sort of tacit comfort. He seems to appreciate the gesture, and softly bites at Lavellan’s neck, his lips lingering to suck at the new indentation on the sensitive skin. “Trying to make marks, are we?” Lavellan asks amusedly through a pleasured and breathy moan. “What are you, seventeen years old?”

Solas laughs at her accusation. “Vhenan, do you know how long ago seventeen was for me?”

“Then tell me, at what age did leaving love bites all over one’s intimate partner begin to lose its shine for the wise and undying elvhen?” she asks with a japing flourish. Everything has changed between the two of them, yet it is strangely easy to fall back into the welcome routine of lazily playful pillow-talk. Lavellan struggles to stay in the moment. 

She turns towards him and he strokes her cheek as she smiles at him. “Seventeen, if I remember correctly. As I said, it has been a long time.” Seemingly happier than he had been moments before, Solas continues, “Perhaps I wish for your people to gossip. What name does their fearless leader have on her lips as she comes undone at the heights of passion, one could wonder?” and gives his telling attentions to her jawline before finishing with a near-chaste peck on her lips. Settling back down, he adds, “And if any of my agents plan to marry soon, I have not been informed of the nuptials, let alone been invited to witness them.”

Lavellan turns and kisses the hand he has left on her face. “Well, I get invited to everyone’s wedding receptions. Usually as a guest of honor. You know, Charter is getting married soon, if you ever knew her. She’s getting that spymaster job I offered you as a joke a while back, by the way, once she and Leliana manage to square away the last of the Viddathari mess we have going on in Caer Bronach. It keeps coming back—what a nightmare that is.” Lavellan rolls her eyes, her expression souring slightly.

“I’ve seen the engagement announcements in everyone’s mail,” Solas says, and Lavellan grimaces and sticks out her tongue at him. “That being said, you all have most certainly grown skilled at hiding useful information from me. This is my fault, as I have allowed you an avenue by which to test my blind spots. Admittedly, I did consider pretending to overlook communication methods and hiding places in order to trick you into trusting their privacy, but as of late especially I have been far too enthusiastic to speak with you to delay our exchanges in such a way.”

“Flatterer,” Lavellan accuses. She presses her lips against one of his temples, and he angles his face up to kiss her in earnest. When it breaks, she adds, “You’re just trying to convince me that you don’t do that.”

“Hardly! I know most of what I do of Caer Bronach from my spies amongst the Qun. On the subject of spying, I don’t suppose you would be willing to inform me of to where you are sending lyrium? I have come to the conclusion that the information my agents have been gathering about a templar unit has been entirely fabricated.” Lavellan wonders how close he is to finding out the truth. Both Seekers led by Cassandra and Wardens led by Rainier had been using the secretiveness of their groups to credit some of their work to Ser M, and Maryden and Cole had been spreading tavern tales of the fictitious knight's heroism wide and far: Cole had sent a bird to tell Lavellan that people liked hearing that good was being done in the world, even if they did not know quite who was doing it.

“You supposed right, you’re getting nothing from me. Let’s stop talking about work.” ‘Work’ is a simplistic way to refer to everything that is happening in the world outside of their room, and Lavellan wants to stay its invasion into their quiet space as long as possible. It is coming, but she will enjoy her last minutes with him. “Anyways, wedding in the spring. You should be my date—then literally everyone can know where all the hickeys came from. You and I can coordinate outfits, and I’ll fight over the bouquet at the end.”

It’s a strange fantasy Lavellan feels herself lapsing into. In it she and her lover stand amongst some happy crowd of friends, and she wears a dress of lace that glints with the glimmer of beads that shine brighter than her harsh armor ever did. Solas places his hand on the small of her back and whispers to tell her she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, so quiet that only she can hear, and they dance with no war or strife between them or anywhere in the world. It is not her usual sort of dream, and for once, she resigns herself to being unable to attain what she most desires.

Solas’s brow raises before he laughs again, half jarring Lavellan from her reverie with the gentle heave of his body. “Ah, you’re joking! Very funny,” he says, using the tiny shift his laughter has caused to settle further into her. More quietly, he adds, “I had near forgotten how much I laughed when we laid together.” She can feel his sadness even as he breathes sweet mirth upon her skin.

Lavellan doesn’t want to be joking. “I was only kidding about the matching outfits,” Lavellan says with a very soft grin. Solas blinks, his jawline slackening as he regards her countenance. It’s a look of lost tiredness, long-held tension eroding into a weathered softness. “Something is wrong,” Lavellan observes, her grin fading. She is needling in part for her own protection.

Solemnity washes onto his countenance. “And there is some matter with you, too. Do not think I cannot tell.”

Lavellan looks up at the ceiling away from him, staring at the shadows pooling between the oaken rafters. She’s aware the declaration is somewhat dramatic: “Absolutely everything is wrong.”

“Yes, vhenan. It is.” In a moment Solas rolls atop Lavellan, pinning her to the sheets by her right hand and left elbow and she lets out a tiny yelp of surprise as his weight settles upon her. Lavellan holds still and appraises Solas with a baited anticipation, meeting his eyes as he stares at her. He is seemingly lost at once in his own thoughts and in her. “But that is typical. So, for myself at least, it suffices to say that it is nothing all.” His gaze finally breaks from hers, flickering down towards her barely parted lips. “You are so wonderful.” 

“You are too, Solas. Please know that you are,” Lavellan says, and the words hardly leave her mouth before Solas kisses her, the initial engagement quickly executed but the caress deep and deliberate. Lavellan frees her right hand from his hold to embrace him. She pulls him down towards her as she begins to wrap her legs around Solas, trying to draw his hips to hers.

A dull ringing noise sounds from across the room, and Lavellan freezes beneath Solas as she recognizes the sound as the signal of a communicator crystal. Solas does not seem to notice her new stiffness as he breaks from her with a slight groan and pulls himself to his knees between her splayed legs. He looks towards the pile of clothes heaped upon an armchair in the far corner of the room, a look of unhappiness washing over him. “Allow me a moment, emma lath?” Solas looks down at Lavellan again and sighs gently.

She thinks for a moment of begging him to ignore the crystal's call and come back to her, but for some reason cannot make herself do it. “Of course,” Lavellan says, quieter than she should, trying to stay trepidation. Solas reaches down and absently runs his fingertips along her body (and despite the new anxiety bubbling within her, the caress makes Lavellan’s stomach flutter) before dismounting from the bed, slipping on his own smallclothes, and crossing the room. 

Lavellan tries to concoct some joke about his modesty, but can’t do it. She stares at the ceiling, but makes herself turn as he speaks. He’s holding a glinting red crystal in his hand. He explains to Lavellan, “It will be one of my lieutenants, if you could call them that. This is a communicator crystal—or are you familiar?” He takes something about her as a ‘yes,’ and says, “Ah, Dorian must have shown you. As much as I loathe conceding the matter, Tevinter managed to make transistors function better than the elvhen ever did. It is likely largely because the Veil strips out some interference, but even that can’t account for the innovations—“ the crystal makes the same noise as it did before, interrupting him. “I will tell you after I hear this. From what I have gleaned in the Fade, the politics that went into securing funds for the development were quite bizarre, even by Tevinter standards.” Solas taps the crystal, and it lights up. His voice becomes much harsher and colder than Lavellan can ever remember hearing as he says, “There is some emergency, I assume.”

A voice comes through the crystal. It is colored with an Orlesian accent and is somewhat unclear, and warps slightly as the person on the other end speaks hurriedly. “Yes, ser. You said not to contact you otherwise, ser. I…it…we...”

“What has happened? Is this a local issue? If so, it can wait,” Solas says.

“No, ser. Not local. Everyone with a crystal…we had decided that it might be best if just one of us reached out. Too much chaos if we all did. And I’m safe. It’s quiet here. The situation is…it is bad, ser. I cannot access the mirror networks. No one can, from what we have gathered. In or out, people are stuck where they are, and, and…“ he trails off. 

Solas furrows his brow and rubs his forehead. “Hm. So the eluvians have gone inert. Is there any news from within?” 

“Not inert, ser…I mean to say, the people in it…they’re fighting with Inquisition soldiers. They’ve somehow stormed the network.” Lavellan’s stomach sinks as Solas stands quiet, a tension visibly building in his back and shoulders. “So many contacts have gone dark. It has gotten to me that the Inquisition taken most of the network hubs. The transition wasn’t clear…but I’ve reason to believe they have stormed your personal areas. I’ve heard fighting. We don’t know how they got in, ser. We could have a traitor who passed off a key, or…or…I do not know. I do not know what I should do, ser. I am locked out in Halamshiral. Almost all of the others you entrusted…they’re either stuck like me or inside. I’m sorry, ser, I—“ the agent trails off as if he is afraid, his voice echoing out of the gem.

Solas still stares at the floor, his head bowed. “You will inform everyone who is listening still to minimize casualties however possible. Unless they wish to die or be trapped within the network indefinitely, they should surrender themselves to the Inquisition peacefully. I will deal with the matter.” Lavellan does not like how that sounds. Solas taps the crystal again, and its light fades as he drops it back into the pile of clothing. He is quiet for a moment, and stands with his eyes closed and his nose scrunched. His face relaxes as he runs his hand over his visage, and he finally turns to Lavellan. “This is your doing, then.” Coldness still permeates Solas’s diction, though now he looks upon her, his grey eyes glinting more sharp than gentle.

Lavellan tries to sit tall, to seem upright and stalwart as she owns up to her transgression, but it feels not only wrong but absurd. She tries to draw the shroud of the covers up to shield her bareness from Solas’s gaze, but cannot even keep her own upon him. “You made the right call. I told my men to attempt to take as many prisoners as possible. Those who stand down will not be harmed.” 

“Then, ultimately, you intend do better by my men than I, Inquisitor,” Solas says. Despite the tone of voice, it seems to be meant as a sort of self-effacing compliment, but the utterance of her title still chills Lavellan. He has not called her ‘Inquisitor’ in a letter in some time. “Hmm. That is what your Inquisition was doing with the lyrium. I did not think that a key could be forged, or that the ‘locks’ could be changed by those without prior understanding of the intricacies of the eluvian's magic. It is likely they may be irreversibly corrupted by your manipulations. I would hope not, but I would have to see in person…” Solas sounds fascinated for a moment and his eyes meander towards the ceiling in thought, but his stare swivels back to Lavellan and the enthralled distance ebbs away to cede again to the tide of encroaching and proximate frost. “Which eluvian did you access the network from?”

“The one nearest to Skyhold,” Lavellan admits, fighting the urge to hang her head. “I owe you an explanation: I found a way to track your agents in my headquarters, and had non-Inquisition allies,” they were mostly Friends of Red Jenny eager to keep coin flowing by having the world remain intact, discreetly offered by Sera through Dagna, “follow them to the nearest eluvians. Once we found a way into the network and knew how to avoid your spies, we organized a campaign using soldiers with no connection to you.” The matter was harder than just not assigning soldiers who were spies: the agents’ social spheres within the barracks had to be considered lest information of impending military action leak in casual conversation.

Lavellan adds, “The Commander and I gave the men orders to take everything they find—artifacts, references, notes—and locate every eluvian attached to the main vein and where they let out. We might shatter them all once we’ve secured them. We haven’t decided yet. It all depends on how well we can safeguard them from you.” Some part of Lavellan does not want to destroy these powerful newly-appropriated tools, which happen to be an aspect of her elvish heritage. The other part of her wishes to go to any length to snatch every asset Solas might have from him and destroy each one. Both parts are grasping and ugly. “Is there anything else you would wish to know?”

“How you tracked my agents. Details of your military operation. The names of those who forged the network key. Nothing that you would be willing to tell me.” Solas pauses. His eyes break from Lavellan, and finally he asks, “No wonder you jumped at my invitation. I did present to you the perfect opportunity to spring a trap.” Something wavers in Solas’s voice, and Lavellan cannot discern what shades of emotion color his words. 

“What was I supposed to do?” Lavellan asks. Her voice wavers slightly. “I saw what you did to those Qunari at the Winter Palace. You’re dangerous. I had to use what you had given to me.” She looks down at the sheets, the flickering gold of the candlelight encroaching and ebbing just rhythmically enough to count the passing of silent seconds. She looks up and speaks again, her voice catching. “Was I supposed to place the sanctity of love above the lives of my men?” 

Lavellan attempts to remain still as Solas looks on. She wants to cry or yell or perhaps even apologize, but she reminds herself that he does not deserve any apology from her.

Finally, Solas says, “You’re right. I am indeed dangerous. You must be aware that you have placed yourself into a very precarious position.” He takes a step forward with a strange lilting grace, his bare feet crossing onto the woven rug that carpets the floor of the room.

As Solas approaches her, Lavellan narrows her eyes, one nostril flared. From his words she fears he intends to kill her, striking a blow on the Inquisition to riposte what the Inquisition had done to him. “Is that supposed to be a threat?” There are worse ways for a public figure to go out than ‘naked in a tavern room in the middle of nowhere,’ but none of them are coming to Lavellan’s mind. She had understood the risk from the beginning, but she had hardly thought on it. She was stupid and selfish and had wanted to see Solas so badly, to talk to him in person and touch him once more. His taste still lingers on her lips. 

“Hardly.” The assurance is icy and not at all comforting. Solas stands before her at the edge of the bed and stares down. “Were you truly so arrogant to believe that over the course of this evening I would not somehow find you out?”

A scoff bubbles forth from Lavellan’s mouth unbidden. “Only if you were truly so arrogant to believe that I could put you before the entire world.” She’d wanted to have both him and the world. She still wants to have both, but the thought arises with a strange and roiling bile. 

Solas’s gaze breaks. It seems as if it pains him to look upon her for too long. “We are quite a pair, then. I had hoped—“ he trails off, and shakes his head with a lengthy exhale. “Never mind. Such a hope was selfish of me.” 

“Never mind what, Solas?” Lavellan asks. She draws the duvet of the bed over her shoulders and around her front and stands mere inches from him. “I wasn’t lying about loving you. I had hoped, too—I’d hoped I would have time, I hoped that you would have shown signs of wanting to change, of wanting to come back to the rest of the world and start again. I was given a choice, to fight or just wait, just hope that—“ She laughs a sad laugh. Hope was what she had been fighting for, but she could not muster it herself. “Hope’s good when you have nothing, but when you’ve got something, you have to act.”

“That is not always true.” Solas falls silent after the half-distant utterance. 

“People were depending on me. All of Thedas is depending on me,” Lavellan says, misery welling in her voice as the bravado holding her shoulders rigid leaves her. She does not know why she is trying to justify herself to him. It should have been a triumph, but she is profoundly unhappy. “I know it doesn’t matter now. When I said I wanted to see you, too, it was the truth—but the truth can be weaponized, and this isn’t about what I want.” Admitting that she has been compelled by duty stings. She’d had no choice. There was nothing different that she could have done, not if she wanted to be a leader deserving of her title. For once, and in a very strange way, her position of power has failed her.

She continues, “I told myself that this wasn’t something that would hurt you. That afterwards, you’d be upset, but we could still be—you know. Friends.” It’s a poor word for what she had desired, but she cannot force herself to utter more. “It was selfish of me.”

His agreement comes with less condemnation than Lavellan feels like it should. “It was exceedingly selfish. We are quite a pair indeed,” Solas repeats with a sad bemusement. 

They fall silent and Lavellan stands there bare on the carpet before her all-powerful nemesis. The gravity of their conversation is permeated with a strange absurdity: an inn room is a paltry and pathetic theatre for such a sweeping and all-consuming war. “So, what now?” she asks, her fingers tightening where the bedsheets meet. She awaits some manifestation of his betrayal, some disastrous tear in his somber calmness. 

“That is a very good question,” Solas says. Still serene he raises a hand to stroke the nape of Lavellan’s neck, and she flinches involuntarily at the touch. She expects the clap of thunder or the crackle of flame to sound and final darkness to encroach upon her world, but instead he strokes her skin with his thumb and calls her by a pet name: “No, vhenan. Please do not be afraid of me, I could not—“ he breaks to pull her toward him, wrapping his arm around her and the blankets as he clasps her to his chest and holds her head bowed to the crook of his neck where she can hear his heartbeat reverberate in his body. Solas is just a man, Lavellan cannot help but think as he runs his fingers through her hair in a gesture that is likely intended to be calming. She is still stiff in his arms. “I do not want to hurt you any more.”

“I lied to you,” Lavellan whispers, her lips moving against his skin. She does not know why she is insistent on the fact, why she seems to be angling for his wrath, for some sort of punishment. She pulls away from him and sits down on the bed, the sheets still wrapped around her shoulders. “It means very little, but I chose this because I felt that using love as a cudgel, as some tool that could guilt and manipulate, further corrupted what we had more than any falsehood could.” She would rather use lies than love as a weapon: using the latter as a tool of war seemed perversely wrong to her. But she is forced to ask herself if those things are not already inseparable. Lavellan questions exactly what purity she had been trying to protect. Whatever had been between her and Solas was horrendously warped and broken, and she wonders if there is truly anything left to salvage.

“It means more than you might think,” Solas says. He casts his eyes downwards.

Another silence settles uncomfortably between them. The air has a palpable tension as the rain patters on the roof above them and Lavellan is unsure of what to do. She half expects Solas to gather his affects and walk out the door. It would probably be for the best if he did. Yet he does not move and still looks down, grimacing as if he is choking on some unpleasant thought.

“Did it feel like this always?” Lavellan asks to break the quiet. “Like you’re poisoning everything with your duty? Your happiness. Your lover.” She had more than half-convinced herself that Solas had deserved to be deceived, that as she kissed him her lips had been coated in his own medicine, which he so eagerly drank down at her behest. She could not fully accept that. “Yourself.”

“Not always. You gave me moments of genuine, unadulterated joy, vhenan, and more peace than you might think,” Solas says. “But these were few and far between amidst my awareness of my own truth. I am sorry for you to feel even a fraction of the same.”

“Why are you apologizing? I was the one that did something wrong! And I said not to apologize—“

“—unless I intended to change? Yes. I know. I would never have you become me to combat me. I would not wish that upon anyone, especially not you." 

Lavellan frowns, looking down at the bedsheets. “Become you? Solas, I—“ she cannot find a way to parse her feelings about the statement, so she asks him to divulge his, “What do you mean?”

“In the choice you have made, you have begun to walk the path of one who sacrifices truth and love and free choice, tenants held so dear for so long, for unfortunate duty, unsavory ends born by unsavory means. We are already too similar in our selfishness and foolish pride." Their pleasant shared qualities do not enter his utterance. "Though I have always seen you as a kindred spirit, I would not have you drawn closer to me still,” Solas says. “Your vallaslin—”

“—don’t you dare start with it,” Lavellan says, a flair of anger sparking in her voice. She was already going to protest his implication of the preservation of everyone’s lives as being one of Lavellan's unsavory ends. Yet she knew he spoke mainly of waging war against one she had loved dearly. He was right in a way. Neither of their missions nor the fruition they sewed could ever bloom into anything but tangled misery for the both of them. And Solas had pressed a button that he should not have pressed when he attempted to speak of her tattoos, and she would protest that transgression: “I know you can’t understand what it means to me, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t respect it.”

“I do not think I can respect it. Those marks are relics of a much crueler time.” Lavellan wonders if Solas realizes the irony of him of all people professing such a thing. Solas continues, “If possible, I would not see the lines of vallaslin nor what those lines represent resurrected with my world. I can, however, respect you and your decision to wear it. But that is not why I thought to mention it.“

Lavellan is still wary of this new conversational direction. “Then what?”

“When I asked you if you wanted them gone…” An almost morose smile crosses Solas’s face. “I am beginning to think that the request rose in part from a separate stream of my own conflicted thoughts. Perhaps I wished not to liberate you from the Evanuris, but from the only member of your pantheon who had in actuality laid his hands upon you—myself. I have conceded before that there was nothing to free you from, but you were indeed tethered in my lies and knotted in puppeteer’s strings.”

“And you left me immediately after,” Lavellan remembers bitterly. “You could have done better than that by just telling me the truth. Without it, your symbolic gesture meant nothing.”

“I had thought to reveal to you everything on that day,” Solas admits, “but I could not. I had both hoped and feared you would have had me still, and hoped and feared that you would cast me away in disgust as I deserved.” His sad grin erupts into a half-genuine chuckle. “The more I think on it, the more I realize you would have likely laughed at me if I had revealed I was Fen’Harel there and then.” 

“Probably,” Lavellan admits, oddly grateful to return the small laugh. “You, a legendary bad-boy. Who would have thought?”

“Yes, things often tend to be much stranger than they first seem.” He bows his head slightly, and the smile begins to dissolve. The warmth that had strangely generated in the air cools quickly as Solas continues, “I have a truth for you now. You were not the only one who came to this room shrouded under false pretenses.”

He takes her hand and holds it in his, and it does little to stay the wave of new terror rising in Lavellan’s chest as the covers fall from her shoulders and her flesh is chilled even in the heated enclave of the inn's room. Of course his truth is to reveal another lie. “No,” she says, and it’s more of a demand than a plea. She had already traded a lie for a lie and both sides had torn at her very being. She does not know if she can deal with another. “Solas, why?” Lavellan thinks to wrench her hand away, but she is limp, strength gone of some sort of terrified exhaustion. She wonders if she has initiated the churning of some new cycle.

Solas sits beside her, slowly as if he too is stilled by trepidation, still clutching her hand. His grasp is warm and gentle and he holds her firmly, raising the hand to his lips. As he presses a kiss onto her skin, Solas says, “I am so sorry, vhenan. I came to tell you goodbye.”

Chapter Text

“What?” Lavellan utters. Solas still gently grasps her right hand, but he might as well have punched her in the gut or performed some other act of violence upon her shuddering being. 

“I thought you should hear it from me in person,” Solas says, and it is not the explanation that Lavellan wants. “I have told you before that you are unique in all of Thedas,” he continues, “and I stand by that still. In all my years, I have never met anyone like you, and it has been exhilarating to know you, to love you. It is no small wonder that you have become too dear to me. Our correspondence has made it abundantly clear to me: my entirety is bound within you. How I feel about you—it would jeopardize everything.”

She wants to tell him that he’s flattering her again. She wants to tell him he should shut his mouth. Neither set of words form at her behest. 

Solas’s other hand cups Lavellan’s face, and his thumb strokes along her tattooed cheekbone. She stares into his eyes and everything seems so immediate and surreal at once. “And the events of this evening have only served to solidify my resolve. I would not have you corrupt yourself to fight me. Even if you oppose my ends, don’t you see why I must do this?”

“Because my fate is in your hands?” Lavellan finally manages to insist, jerking her face away from him and ripping her hand from his own. Where his grasp had held her become cold in the absence of his heated touch. “I’ll make my own decisions about what I do and the lengths to which I go! And I’m nothing like you at all, not with the stakes that I’m fighting for!” She turns away from him and thinks to pull herself off the bed, but stays seated because she does not know if she can trust the integrity of her knees. Her head and stomach swim, turbulent waves crashing within her. The only worse place for her than on a bed next to him would be on the floor at his feet. 

As if lecturing her, Solas begins, “You are young hero, an inspiration to the dispossessed whose very name is enough to instill dread into the wicked and rally the righteous. You fight a truly monstrous war, yet you think you are smart enough and resilient enough to come out on top through everything, relatively uncorrupted, even as you compromise the principles you have sworn to never betray. I have seen this all before, da’len.” A hand finds Lavellan’s shoulder, but she disgustedly shrugs it away. “It does not end well. You may not possess magic that can tear the sky asunder, but there are armies of people who will jump at your command. You have said yourself that the world depends upon you. You would not want that blood on your hands.”

“And you think becoming some soulless animal will save me from that fate?” Lavellan asks with a cold laugh. “If I have to fight something with no conscience—something cunning and ruthless who exploits the pain of the oppressed—“

She still does not look at him as she pauses to think. Fighting Solas wasn’t like fighting Corypheus. The Venatori were nationalist radicals bent upon the superiority of their own kind and the subjugation of all others, and their preemptive violence toward Inquisition troops had necessitated retaliation. Corypheus had already corrupted the Red Templars so deeply with the blighted lyrium that they were pained shells of men by the time they threw themselves at Lavellan’s near-merciful blade. Lavellan had met with moral travails in her work before, but never on such a scale. If her war with Solas left the shadows, potentially killing the elves that worked for him would be difficult to justify. Their animosity towards the entirety of modern Thedas was born from generations of wrongful anguish and abuse.

Lavellan remembers a woman dead in a flowerbed. She wonders if direction and hope, even a false one, for a different tomorrow could have saved her mother, if some great cause could have done what her child could not. Lavellan knows that the question was not so simple, and that she could never know. Lavellan remembers a frustrated girl of ten, sixteen, twenty, distraught that no matter how smart, how strong, how well-spoken she was, that she was at the mercy of a world turned against her for what she was.

She remembers a restless and discontented woman of twenty-five jumping at the first opportunity to sail across the Waking Sea to merely glimpse the grinding of the gears of two great powers, the opportunity to just look at something that mattered. She begrudgingly understands the appeal that Solas’s call to reshape the world might possess. He commands people—people Lavellan feels a real kinship with—propelled by generations of pain, not cretins brainwashed by supremacist hate and leashed legions of dead men walking.

Lavellan has people at her disposal, too. It is a disturbing way to conceptualize the matter. She swallows down an odd discomfort, and continues, “If I have to fight you, what’s to stop me from realizing that I must discard my own conscience? I sacrificed my principles and ideals for the success of tonight’s operations. Those sound grand, but they are nothing compared to the thousands upon thousands of lives I could come to play with if this escalates.”

Solas’s voice is grim. “That is indeed a possibility. I have tried not to consider that scenario. Perhaps I wish to destroy my heart to anesthetize myself to the inevitability of such tragedy. But such a thing is—”

“—selfish?” Lavellan cuts him off, looking back at him. Solas appears to be surprised that she has interrupted him. “You would continue to hurt me for the sake of your own momentary indulgences, yet not attempt to find real happiness for yourself? You claim to find no joy in what you do now. That’s not just selfishness, Solas.” She further turns her body to face his, and leans back upon her bracing right arm as she speaks. Solas’s hand trails down Lavellan’s arm, sinking from the place where it holds her. Lavellan wants her assertion to sting: “That’s cowardice.”

Solas blinks, seemingly taken aback once more by the pointed accusation. “Cowardice? Without a doubt, my intent to harden my heart to the consequences of my actions could be construed as such. But that is not what you’ve spoken of! What courage does it take to forget what I did? Would you rather I not face my own wrongdoing? The fact it was all I believed I could do at the time does little to mitigate the impact. Regardless of my intent, my actions destroyed the glory of Elvhenan and have brought pain and death to millions.” He looks away from Lavellan, and he seems strangely unhinged as he shakes his head. The measures of control that had seemed to characterize his every motion, save spare and slipping moments of intimacy, seem to have eroded away into a nervous and tumultuous energy barely contained. “Every atrocity of the Tevinter Imperium, the Blights perhaps included, every transgression of the Chantry, every crime committed by the Circles, every oppression levied by cruel lords in the past score of ages…if I had not torn down the Veil—”

“What would have happened otherwise? You were already fighting a war against slaving tyrants! It wasn’t as if you destroyed some utopia! What you did was wrong. Terrible, even. I’d never try to discount that. But the world that arose in the wake of it all is more than just a manifestation of your mistake. We don’t need your fixing, or your palliative mercy. It’s so arrogant of you to think that you should be the one to decide everything! Maybe the sun can keep rising and the stars can keep shining without your intercession.” Lavellan is quiet for a moment, and a gentleness she does not quite want finds her way into her voice as she adds, “It’s difficult to accept that you and your own actions aren’t the be-all, end-all. Terrifying, sometimes.” 

Solas rejoinder is quiet and cool in its attempt at caution. “You speak from experience.” He wants an affirmation of his kindred spirit, proof of her understanding presence. 

Lavellan does not know if she can provide him with the congruity his loneliness so desires. “Maybe,” she says. She bites her bottom lip before continuing almost tactfully, “I have to accept that there are things I can’t control. You have to accept that there are things you shouldn’t try to control.”

“If I could avoid it it, do you think I would level destruction upon all of Thedas?” Solas asks, shaking his head. “There are matters that are beyond my control, as well. I am not a god.”

“So why do you think you have license to play one? You’ve no more right to the world than any of us,” Lavellan insists. She leans ever so slightly forward and rests her hand upon his chest. She can feel his heart beat and the soft heave of his breath. There is an odd vulnerability about him that serves to pain her even more. “Despite all your years and all your power, you’re just a person.” It’s almost impossible for Lavellan to regard Solas as anything else than a mere man. He sits there and accepts her gesture of comfort in his underwear, and all her grandiose conceptions of the conflict between them have been burnt away by the candlelight and intimacy. “And I don’t think you’re a bad one. I know you’re doing what you believe to be right, but what you fight for is ashes, memories of something long dead and gone. You don’t need to hurt people for that. You don’t need to hurt yourself for that." 

He casts his eyes down at where she touches him. “Why do you try so hard to save me? Especially now that you have gained an upper hand in our war. I am not worth this effort.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m an egomaniac who doesn’t know when to quit,” Lavellan says with another absolutely joyless laugh, “Or maybe it’s because I think you’re brilliant and kind-hearted and could do wonderful things if you put your mind to it. Or maybe it’s because I love you and I want you to be happy.” She adds quietly, “I want us both to be happy. Maybe I’m being selfish.”

“It is a dark day indeed when one realizes that they are the villain who seeks to eviscerate love and extinguish hope,” Solas says half to himself, seemingly watching her hand rise and fall slightly upon his chest as he breathes, the shadows moving with the flicker of candlelight. He says louder and with some resolve, “You deserve to be selfish in this regard. And you have always deserved better than me. Even if I abandoned my designs for the Veil, I do not think I could give you what you want of me.”

She shakes her head, and does not know what to say to convince him otherwise. His assertion that he could not find happiness would likely be a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Oh, shut up,” Lavellan insists, and continues, “Solas, I don’t want anything from you but you. You know if you tried to be happy, if you really, honestly tried, I would go to the ends of Thedas to help you do that.” She really means it, and it hurts to know he will likely never accept her offer. The joke she adds is more of wishful thinking than anything else: “And you know me. I can succeed at anything I put my mind to.” 

“So you say so shortly after you admit that there are things that you cannot control,” he says. Solas gives her a half a smile, his shoulders relaxing. “There’s the confidence that I have come to love.”

“Well, yes. I’m a political figurehead,” Lavellan says, returning the expression despite everything within herself. She bows her head toward him slightly, grinning and trying to live up to her own words: “If I can’t put a brave face on things, what am I good for?” 

Solas reaches to grasp her left forearm, completely closing in the space between the two. “So many things, vhenan. So many things.” His hands settle upon her, running soft circles upon her skin. “I had wanted to see you once more before I went,” he confesses sadly, “to have you and hold you just one more time.”

“And now you have done just that,” Lavellan says, the warmth of her forged smile dissolving into exhaustion. She wants to collapse into him and cry, to hold him and beg him to stay, where he could have her and hold her forever. If her words hadn’t swayed him, it was unlikely that her entreating tears would have any effect. She pulls herself away from him, as if to fight a natural tendency towards his being, and slips onto her feet. Her knees thankfully do not buckle and her legs carry her across the room to stand near the window on the farthest wall from Solas. Rain still dedicatedly patters upon the panes. Lavellan cannot see very far in the dark of the night, and she crosses her arms over her bare chest the best she can without a left forearm or prosthesis to take its place. It is cold near the window and it crosses her mind that she should have thought to bring a blanket, but Lavellan does not move from her spot.

Long minutes pass in silence as the Inquisitor stares into the darkness outside where outlines of trees slump and shiver in the autumn gale. The still between Lavellan and Solas settles in and gives way to not only the drum of the rain but the whistle of the wind and footsteps and quiet voices sounding from the floor above. Lavellan thinks she can even hear the higher notes of the lyrist still playing a lullaby in the late night in the inn’s main hall. The world has gone on outside the room, its grinding tread slow but lively still. Lavellan asks Solas, “So what now?”

Somewhere behind her, Solas says what she fears to hear most: “It is best that I leave. I should look at the eluvian. I have no idea what the Inquisition did to the network, or how I might go about repairing it.” He adds, “Oh. And I should set about fixing your smallclothes. I apologize for my impatience.”

“How long will that take to do?” Lavellan asks, trying to maintain a faulty stoicism. She is trying to void herself of feeling, to not collapse in front of him. “The eluvian, not my brassiere.” The clarification might have been funny at another time.

“I had assumed. Once I reach the eluvian it could take less than a minute to regain control, or I could spend a decade discovering that its corruption is irreversible. I would have to see it in person to even begin to know,” Solas says. There is a quiet, and when Lavellan turns, Solas still sits on the bed. “But,” he continues, looking down at the sheets, “it is dark out and pouring rain, and I would use any excuse to stay with you until morning. I hope that is not too much to ask for.”

“And that’s the end for the two of us,” Lavellan says, her stomach turning. She walks towards the bed again and sits down on the opposite end of it from him, once more averting her gaze. “Isn’t it?” A very real part of her wants Solas gone now, so she no longer has to wait in trepidation for him to vanish and never return to her.

“Most likely,” Solas seems pained to say so, “yes.” Then this was indeed the end. Solas would leave her at daybreak and never contact her again, and Lavellan fights the dread of realizing that they would very likely die fighting one another, and bitterly resolves that once he leaves, she will begin to prepare to win over him at all costs. Though she will hold him as long as he allows her to, Lavellan hopes that Solas does not want sex again in the intervening hours. She is not even sure that she will be able to do so much as touch him again without crying.

A thought occurs to her. “Most likely?” she asks, turning to look upon him as she tries hard not to feel a single thing, not to read into those two words.

Solas shakes his head with a small smile returning to his lips, and for a moment, Lavellan is scared of what that means. He repeats, “Most likely. Tonight you have given me much to contemplate. It would be unlike me to leave the matters raised intellectually unsettled before I destroy the last vestiges of myself. And to think through it, perhaps I could use—“

“—someone to write to?” Lavellan finishes in a dazed and disgustingly excited voice. She wants to be mad at him for putting her through the evening to return to their starting point, but she more desperately wants to recapture what they had held between them in their correspondence, even if that had represented a mere shadow of their prior relationship and had been fraught at times with deception and animosity. Only Solas could serve to drive her so far from rationality.

“Precisely.” Solas then begins to laugh in earnest, more than Lavellan has ever heard him laugh at once, and he leans back onto the bed, propped up on his elbows as his legs hang over the edge. Breathlessly with a voice full of wonder, he says, “To meet you here was incredibly foolish of me.”

“And you’re laughing about it,” Lavellan says, shaken by the suddenness of his shift in demeanor. Perplexed, she frowns, wondering when her lover has ever made any sort of sense. “I don’t like this, Solas." 

Solas’s laughter subsides and settles into a quiet grin, and he looks to her, laying just beyond her reach in the light of the candles. He smiles at Lavellan, his perfect cheeks raising ever so slightly with his lifted countenance. Lavellan cannot help but think him very beautiful. “My feelings for you alone jeopardize everything,” Solas explains, “and I should have known that seeing you and listening to your reason would further endanger my intent. It could be that I did know.”

“Meaning what?” Lavellan asks. She pulls herself further onto the bed and moves towards him across the covers almost inadvertently. If he knew she could talk him down, and he came anyways... Lavellan almost does not want to posit her theory in case she is wrong: “That you wanted to sabotage your own plans?” She had been trying to sway him with the written word for months, and wonders how much her letters have served to change his heart.

“I am beginning to come to that conclusion,” answers Solas. "It may have always been my intent in writing you. It is an ill omen for a world to be unwanted even by its creator." With a wave of his hand he urges Lavellan to come closer to him, and pulls himself into a seated position to bring his face level to hers. Lavellan is somehow suddenly close enough to see the flecks of lilac that grace his grey eyes and the freckles that span the bridge of his nose. She does not know how to feel as she looks upon Solas, but senses that there is something new in his expression, a very tenuous levity that she has never seen in him before. “Perhaps,” Solas says, “I shall wake up tomorrow and realize this was all a terrible idea.”

Solas reaches to touch Lavellan’s cheek, and she realizes too late that he had done so to gently blot away the first tear that had fallen from her brimming eyes. He wants to stay, she realizes, and in her strange blooming joy she does not know what to say. “I—I would like that very much.”

“Believe me when I say that I would, too, vhenan. More than anything in the world,” Solas says, and, swallowing down her own muddled crying, Lavellan, bid by love and a very tentative happiness, leans forward to claim his lips with an open-mouthed and enthusiastic fervor.

Solas takes Lavellan in his arms and returns the kiss, and it may be the first time they have ever embraced without lies or secrets between them. With no distance to be bridged by pen and paper to separate the two, they tangle in one another’s arms, enamored in their entrapment with one another. Lavellan is aware that she has been made no promises about what will happen when the dawn comes, but in uncertainty, she finds hope.