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Lavellan was slumped against the rock, staring out into the sleeting gray beyond. She had been there for some time, while Solas repeatedly verified there was nothing in the nook that could be burned for heat.
“If you sit there, you will never dry,” she said, with an attempt at levity which made her wince behind Lavellan’s back. Pathetic. Lavellan had every reason to be annoyed with her; Solas had never found herself playing hot and cold quite the way she did with the inquisitor.
If only there had been one other person who was with them!
If only Lavellan had not stepped between Solas and the despair demon; she might have been able to run off with the others. Instead, they had been forced away from the rest of the party together and now Solas had too much time to think.
(To think about that sight: Lavellan’s slight form moving to stand between her and an imminent threat, Lavellan, injured, between her and the thing that wanted to hurt her.)
This far up in the mountains, the wind didn’t even whistle—there were no trees for it to blow through. Beyond the lip of the narrow cave—crevice, really—they had squeezed into, the icy downpour continued. The light outside was the muted gray of a winter afternoon.
Solas was about to open her mouth and insist that Lavellan come and let Solas have a look at her leg, when Lavellan spoke, though not to address Solas’ inane earlier remark.
“Do you miss home?” she asked.
Solas paused so long it became apparent she was struggling to answer the question.
“I know you don’t like talking about it,” Lavellan added. “But do you…miss it?”
“I…” Solas passed a hand back over the top of her head. It was getting stubbly and she’d have to shave it again soon, but she’d known that for days. “I suppose I do. It…feels I have been away for a very long time, and I…am not sure I will ever be able to return. Can any of us return to a place, once we have left it?”
She ought to be used to this by then, but she could still pinch herself. There was something about Lavellan’s low, even voice that made her say so much more than she meant to say, so much more than she ought to say. Hurriedly, she threw another question into the air to try to block Lavellan from further inquiry.
“You must miss your clan,” she blurted out. She already knew the answer to that—Lavellan had already told her. “Such bonds must be…close.”
Lavellan scraped a finger against a divot in the rock.
“I’ve never been away from them before,” she confessed. “Not until the Divine Conclave. I’ve only just stopped telling myself I need to go talk to someone, only to remember they aren’t around.” She turned back around, finally, to look at Solas, and it was not easier to think with those great brown eyes fixed on her. Lavellan looked so openly at her, it made Solas feel like the one who was a great raw wound. She could barely remember a time she had been so free with her feelings.
“What do you miss about home?” she asked. Solas’ gaze slid away; against her will, memories welled up in her mind, threatening to whisk her away from the present entirely. She had to answer though; it was not right to refuse, not when Lavellan was trying to be vulnerable with her (with her).
“The poetry,” she said at last, which was not untrue. “It was a great game in my home; a poet might spend years working on something.” She might spend centuries. “We could use it to tell stories, to explain a feeling, even to argue. And the sound of that language, lyrical, lilting in the background of every day…” To her surprise, a smile was twitching on Lavellan’s lips.
“Really? I suppose I am not surprised.” There was the shadow of a laugh in her voice.
“Are you not?” Solas probed.
“It’s very like you,” she replied, smiling in truth now. Solas frowned lightly.
“What do you mean by that?” she said.
Lavellan shrugged. “I don’t know. It makes sense that you would think of art. Language. Something that tells a story, real or not real.” She shrugged again and frowned herself. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Do you mean to say you find me predictable?” Solas asked, unable to keep herself from sounding genuinely concerned and displeased with the prospect. Lavellan looked at her a long moment, and then let out a laugh, a rushed, joyful sound that bounced off the walls of their little rock nook.
“Perhaps only to me?” she suggested, smiling, a combination that made Solas’ heart twirl about in her chest like an acrobat. Well. Perhaps being predictable to Lavellan wasn’t so bad. “I do like to think I know you a little bit,” she went on, a definite note of teasing in her voice then as she leaned towards Solas. Maybe it wasn’t bad at all.
She had, after all, known that Solas would not be opposed to getting a kiss.
Solas found it both impossible to look at her, or to look away, and settled for continuing to face Lavellan while averting her eyes over to the cave wall.
“Ah, well,” she said. “I suppose you do, a little bit.”
It had struck her at various times throughout the last year, how different this time had been to the months she spent wandering before the Conclave. How lonely that had been! Even Solas, who prided herself on her ability to be as independent as a person could be, who often preferred even painful solitude to the chaos of company found it hard to deny this. In this new world, there were not even spirits to speak with, except in her dreams, and she knew she had underestimated how difficult her time alone had been when she felt such intense delight being included by Lavellan’s circle of friends and advisors. She really should not have made Blackwall hobble back to his cot with a bucket in front of him, even if she had thrashed him at a game he taught her to play (she had returned his clothes the next morning).
But it was in these moments—the ones where it felt like Lavellan saw her—that she suspected she had been lonely a long time before she’d ever gone to sleep.
“What do you miss?” she asked, crossing her legs, waiting with real curiosity for Lavellan’s answer, her eyes settling on Lavellan as if to examine a well-loved painting from a new angle.
“The halla,” Lavellan answered promptly.
“The halla?” Solas echoed. Then she could not hold back from a laugh. “Now that is just like you!” she said. She could just imagine Lavellan, dark amidst the white herd, both hands reaching out to pet as many heads as she could, soft noses probing her for treats, her laughter when they nibbled at her clothes and pouches. Lavellan was smiling again. Then it felt safe to say: “We should look at your leg.”
Lavellan nodded and moved nearer. She had been limping since they ran from the fight, and when she had not been, Solas had seen her jaw gritted with the effort of walking normally. She had not asked before sliding her arm around Lavellan to help her to their current perch and Lavellan had not protested.
When she extended her leg, Solas could see the scorched fabric streaking across her thigh and the blistered skin underneath. Someone’s magic projectile had grazed her, or a bit of hot shrapnel had hit her in the chaos of the fight.
Unfortunately, Solas was not a healer, so she spent an inordinate amount of time examining it and thinking about what was best to do. In the past, she had been adept in basic battlefield medicine, but so much of her magic was not what she expected in this strange, dull world, and she was reluctant to get experimental with Lavellan’s lovely leg.
“We should wash it,” they said at the same time, and then met each other’s eyes in mild surprise. Lavellan smiled again, and Solas, with her hand hovering over Lavellan’s thigh, thought of the Fade, and of Lavellan trekking through the crossroads to bring food to hungry war refugees, and of the way Lavellan deferred the Chantry and its soldiers and bureaucrats away from Solas again and again, believing Solas as vulnerable to their threat as she was herself.
I would protect you.
How would you do that?
However I had to.
She smothered a shiver; the recollection of Lavellan’s words made her feverish.
“Let me see if I can catch some sleet,” she said, taking the hollow gourd bottom attached to her belt and stepping out into the weather. Immediately, her eyes squinted against the slanted precipitation and bits of ice stung her cheeks; she realized she must have dried off some in the nook, because she was now too aware of becoming wet again. But she managed to gather perhaps an inch of rain and ice into the small bowl, which she took back to Lavellan to sluice over her burn.
Lavellan gasped, going rigid at the ice water over her wound; one hand flashed out and struck Solas in the chest, clutching at the knit fabric of her undyed tunic.
“…my apologies,” Solas offered, thinking now it would have been better to warn her before upending the water onto the injury.
“It’s fine,” said Lavellan through clenched teeth. Solas used the corner of her tunic to scrape any dirty or lingering fibers of Lavellan’s singed pants from the burn. At length, Lavellan began to relax, and when Solas made the mistake of looking up, she met Lavellan’s eyes. Quickly (reluctantly) she turned her attention back to her work, but Lavellan spoke.
“Solas,” she said. “What will you do when this is over?”
Solas thought it was awfully optimistic of her to think there would be a time when this was all over, but she couldn’t criticize for that—she had grown, she thought, overly dependent on Lavellan’s optimism to keep her from sinking into the mire of her own mind. What in the world had she done about this before?
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Solas with an unconvincing airy nonchalance. “Keep walking, I suppose.”
“You won’t go home?” she asked. Lavellan’s wound was clean, but Solas kept wiping at the edges of it.
“Not yet, I think,” she murmured. “I have…not yet.”
There was something on the edge of Lavellan’s tongue, and Solas had a nauseating feeling she knew what it was, and she hoped beyond reason that Lavellan would not say it, because she was sick to a throbbing in her head with the desire to hear it.
“There’s so much of the world yet to see,” she shoehorned in, not caring how clumsily it came out, nor how false the cheer in her voice. She needed something to keep Lavellan from asking Solas to return north with her. She withdrew her hands from the wound. Lavellan was worrying her lower lip, her eyes sober, fixed on Solas’ face.
“There is,” she agreed. “But you needn’t see it alone.”
Oh, blast it all. This was worse, this was worse. Solas would go mad closeted in a tiny Dalish camp full of people telling her how grand Elgar’nan was even with Lavellan’s charming and open-minded company, but to be on the road with her? Wandering, exploring, dreaming? She could almost forget there was anything else in the world with which to be concerned.
I would protect you.
Lavellan’s hand on her cheek.
Lavellan pulling Solas towards her, wanting her near. Lavellan turning to Solas before anyone else.
Lavellan’s heartbeat beneath her ear, her hand warm on Solas’ back, the sound of their friends talking in the distance.
Abruptly, Solas rose to her feet.
“I will see if I have some elfroot salve for that,” she said. Perhaps it was good no one else was there. Lavellan made her sound like a brainless moron half the time anymore. She went over to her backpack and began rifling around as if she didn’t know perfectly well where her little clay jar of medicinal salve was tucked.
The cleft in the rock where they were crouching was rapidly growing dark. Outside, the weather was worsening; Solas thought she heard a dulcet retort of thunder.
It was almost quiet as Solas retrieved the jar, returned to Lavellan, and began to smear the salve on with two fingers, but Solas did not think it was quiet because Lavellan was done thinking about their conversation.
“Solas…” she began at last.
“Yes?” Solas asked too promptly.
The silence went on.
“Oh, never mind,” Lavellan muttered at last. “I’ve forgotten.” Solas did not think that was true. But she said nothing.
She rubbed the paste into Lavellan’s burn and Lavellan made a low noise of discomfort, but held still under Solas’ hands. The anchor in Lavellan’s left hand flared light briefly, and she let out a huff of breath.
“Is it hurting you?” Solas asked quietly.
She had tried so hard to take it away. For brutal hours she had sat in that dungeon in Haven, trying every magical method she could think of to pry that thing out of Lavellan’s hand at any cost—the only reason she had stopped short of killing her was that she could not be sure that she would be able to retrieve the anchor, and it seemed better to have it attached to a living person rather than riveted to a corpse.
She thought often, lately, of how close she had come to suffocating the life out of Lavellan and trying to dig her tool out of the body. Sometimes, Lavellan held her hand with that hand, the anchor one, and Solas could think of almost nothing else.
“Not really,” Lavellan replied. “It’s…tingly. Like my hand has gone to sleep and is now waking up. A very long sleep.” She held her hand out between them and Solas reached silently for it, pausing for Lavellan to nod go ahead before grasping it between her own. Lavellan made a tch sound. “Your hands are so cold!” she said, and folded hers over one of Solas’ in turn. It did not offer much help—Lavellan’s hands were cold too—but it did smother the light of the anchor. Their eyes locked over their hands, and Lavellan said, after too long a pause, “I think we’ll be here overnight.”
“Yes, I think we will,” said Solas, relieved and disappointed to be back to mundane conversational topics.
“We’ll need to stay warm,” Lavellan pointed out.
Solas’ hands were moving to unclasp her cloak before the M was fully out of Lavellan’s mouth.
“Here,” she said, spreading it open to invite Lavellan inside. For just a beat Lavellan looked at her, and Solas felt the blood rushing to her face. “As there is nothing for us to burn,” she quickly added. “And it will be easier to use a warming spell if you stay close.”
Lavellan’s dark skin made it hard to say if she was blushing too, but Solas fancied she did not look displeased as she moved nearer and tucked herself against Solas’ side. For a moment she squirmed, then withdrew her own cloak from behind her and spread it over their legs.
“There,” she said. “Cozy.” It was not, not at all, and the rock was still cold under Solas’ ass despite how long she’d been sitting there. She snorted a little and draped her cloak more securely over Lavellan’s shoulder.
“I’ll let you be the judge of that,” she said. They shifted a little, trying to find the most comfortable position, and Lavellan hissed as Solas’ thigh rubbed against her burn. Hastily, Solas apologized, and they rearranged to put Lavellan on the other side. “Are you cozy now?” she asked.
Lavellan made a little amused noise, but Solas could hear the tiredness in her voice by then. She knew Lavellan had not been sleeping well the last few days; she knew the weight of the inquisitor’s mantle was heavy on her shoulders.
“Let me tell you a story,” she offered, her voice softening. She slid an arm around Lavellan, because it was more comfortable than having it pinned to her side, and because they were trying to huddle for warmth, after all.
“That would be lovely,” said Lavellan, and before Solas had even sorted out what to tell, Lavellan’s head had settled on her shoulder.
It should have frightened her. It should have terrified her, and somewhere in the dark and half-smothered crevices of her mind, it did, but in that moment, all she felt was the warmth that bloomed in her sternum and spread outward to the tips of her fingers and toes. Her arm tightened automatically around Lavellan, and she felt some surge of renewed tender energy that if they had decided to keep going, she could have walked across that mountain all night.
She thought of the journey to Haven; how Lavellan had kept stopping to make sure Solas stayed with the group no matter how hard she tried to trail behind (how, at the time, it had irritated her, lost in thoughts of how to repair the situation); how she had continually made an effort to make conversation even when Solas was cranky and unresponsive (this had also annoyed her); how in spite of how painfully vulnerable this lone Dalish felt, she had steeled herself to try to connect with the only potential allies she had available.
“Something set in a warm place, I think…” Solas mused aloud, and then launched into her story. She was certain Lavellan had fallen asleep before the end, but she could not find herself upset about this. The idea that someone could fall asleep to the sound of Solas’ voice—that it could feel safe enough to do so—no, she did not want to linger on those implications. If she thought on them too long, she began to feel phantom blood crusted under her nails.
Yet, when Solas had lapsed into silence for some minutes, Lavellan spoke.
“Solas…” She lifted her head. The world was dark by then; she could not see Lavellan, only feel her movements, imagine the space she occupied. Even the sickly green of the anchor was gone; Lavellan’s palm must have been turned down against something. The weather had gone all quiet; Solas could not hear a single raindrop.
“Yes, lethallin?” she replied softly.
“You tell such beautiful stories.” She could not see; she must have felt the air stir, felt the shift in the heat from Lavellan’s body; she knew and rather than draw away, she leaned inward. “I want to be a part of them,” Lavellan whispered.
“You are.” Solas could hear the ache in her own voice, the pull between what Lavellan was in Solas’ story, and what Solas wanted her to be.
“I would be, if you let me.” When Lavellan moved again, Solas moved with her, and met Lavellan’s seeking mouth with hers. Both their lips were cold and chapped from the journey (and inexperienced to boot), but Lavellan’s touch was soft, and Solas melted into it like sinking into a plush bedroll at the end of a long day, giving the answer she could not voice: I want you to be.
Lavellan drew nearer still; her arms went around Solas’ shoulders, and then they were pressed together, grounded fully and inextricably in the physical realm as Lavellan embraced her. She could not say if it was her true or her desperate imaginings, but she felt the beat of Lavellan’s heart against her chest. In the dark, at least, Lavellan could not know how her eyes stung as she hugged Lavellan in return. She would only know how tightly Solas embraced her.
She thought of their lessons in Elvish grammar; and how Lavellan slowed her step whenever they passed elven ruins, trying to take in as much of the detail as she could; and how Lavellan listened.
They said nothing else, but it was a long time before they let go of each other, and Solas was still not quite ready as Lavellan drew back.
“We should try to get some sleep,” she advised.
“Yes,” Solas agreed, so they laid out her cloak on the ground to put something between themselves and the frigid rock, and then lay down with Lavellan’s thrown over them as a too-short make-shift blanket. For too many minutes, they lay in shivering silence, and then Lavellan spoke again.
“You’re still cold.”
“I will survive,” said Solas.
“I can feel you shaking,” Lavellan chided. “Come closer, I can help.”
Thinking—stupidly, in retrospect—that Lavellan was going to put to use another spell to warm them (as if she had the energy left for that!), Solas shifted closer.
“No, turn around,” Lavellan said, sounding just slightly flustered, so Solas rolled over with her back to Lavellan. Instead of the spell, of course, Lavellan simply insinuated herself up against Solas’ back and put an arm around her; she felt the chill press of Lavellan’s nose against the back of her neck.
“Oh,” she said, stupidly. Yes, maybe it was for the best that no one else was with them.
“We can trade,” Lavellan murmured, her breath warm where her nose had been cold.
“Okay,” said Solas, voice so soft it was barely audible. In the close darkness, her hand found Lavellan’s good hand. “Guinevere,” she said, more firmly.
“Mhm?”
“Dream well.”
Even in the dark, Solas could picture Lavellan’s smile.
“You too,” she said, and Solas felt almost sure there was the brush of lips against her clothed shoulder. Lavellan had fit her body very nearly to Solas’, and Solas felt keenly aware of this long, unbroken stretch of contact between them, and the warmth that insinuated itself between her legs. It was not often she had much feeling for the form she had chosen when she took it, but she was relieved beyond utterance presently that she had chosen as she did—this form, at least, offered some privacy. Thus shielded it was not, she found, an uncomfortable place to be; there was a pleasure in the low embers of desire banked but untended; a subtle heat to enjoy. Unfortunately, she did not have the energy to lay there all night and simply bask in Lavellan’s embrace—she fell asleep.
When she shivered awake from self-inflicted nightmares, they were separated. Solas’ breath came too quickly, and she rolled onto her side, already moving instinctively to separate herself further and take some air alone, but this time, she paused. Beside her, Lavellan slept on uneasily. Dark and quiet and chill as a tomb was the world around her; here, Solas could have believed they were the only people alive. Slowly, Solas lowered herself back onto the ground. She shifted closer, and drew Lavellan into her arms, and if the rock was hard and pebbly under her ribs and hips, and her sleep fractured and shallow, there was Lavellan, and somehow that made the rest feel less important. Lavellan shifted, pressing her cheek against Solas’ breast, and she thought perhaps it was this for which she had physical form—so that Lavellan would have a place to rest her head.
She stroked a hand lightly over Lavellan’s braids, and heard the soft whistle of her breath, and wondered what she was dreaming. In spite of the discomfort, she could not bring herself to wish for the night to end; how long would she be permitted to cradle a fragile thing against the beat of her heart, to guide and nurture and even protect instead of destroy?
(This was the danger in Lavellan, the one that made Solas ask questions about some other future, one she knew could not be hers, had known since first she had understood this world, and which she had never desired until now.)
She did drift off again, warm inside if not outside, and only woke once more when her hand touched an empty space beside her and her mind immediately began sprinting back to consciousness.
Opening crusty, bleary eyes, she saw there was once more light in the nook. Lavellan was out of bed, crouched beside the opening, and limned in the new light of day like Hope breaking free from the sky to touch her toes to the mortal plane. She must have heard the stirring, for she turned back to look at Solas and smiled, lighting up the crevice.
“Look! The sun has come out. We can keep going now.”
Solas, groggy with sleep and dazed with Lavellan’s affection, had the sharp and unavoidable sense she was lost for good. It felt less like a doom and more like freedom, if she could just loose the last of her grip on the anchor keeping her from the clouds. She said: “Yes. It has.”