Chapter Text
This time they are in Skyhold, though he knows she left it long ago. His caretaker told him how she was the last, even Josephine having departed, the maids and the cooks and the stablehands gone, dismissed home, sent away to find a new purpose for their lives, just as he had sent her away. How she’d carefully placed his books back in the library, packed the relics and tokens on his desk in a small crate that still sat in the rotunda, sealed the inkwell with wax so it wouldn’t dry out before he returned. Then she’d grazed her fingers over the walls of the rotunda and smiled sadly at the caretaker before silently walking through the fortress and out of the gate, over the bridge and beyond his agents’ sight.
But they were in Skyhold now. He’d seen her do this before, or something similar, countless times in the past few months. She sat on the edge of the bed, trying to braid her hair with her remaining hand. He’d watched her practice, adapting her spells to be castable with one hand, arranging the tack on her horse, relearning how to write. Every night she practiced in her dreams what had frustrated her during the day, like a child learning to walk, dreaming itself into proficiency. It had made her stronger, better. He could admit that now, all these months later. She had abandoned her staff, but her spellcasting rivaled any mage in Thedas now, even him, if Mythal hadn’t helped him regain his powers. She could do with one hand what many people struggled to do with two.
Except this. Except the intimate things. Lacing her stays, clasping her armor, braiding her hair. He didn’t know, he couldn’t, but she struggled through each personal activity, still alone, for long minutes every day, never quite finishing them the way she wanted to, but settling for good enough. His heart would have ached to see the gaps in her armor alone. He had watched her dream these things for months, but this— this was not practice. This was not learning to function again. This was pure loss.
He stood in the shadowy memory of the doorway, unseen, as she struggled with the tangled strands of her hair, wondering why she kept coming back to this. At last, she gave up, gently setting aside the brush. He was startled to see the glitter of a tear roll down her cheek. In all their time together, in all the dreams he’d watched even, she'd rarely cried in front of him. Every time because of me, he thought with a guilty pang. She covered her face with her hand.
He sighed. He shouldn’t do this. It would only make things worse. But he couldn’t bear the defeat in her shoulders or the way she shook with grief. He crossed to the bed, climbing onto it behind her and picking up the brush and the leather laces. He slid the brush gently through the memory of her hair, willing it smooth, remembering the weight and thickness of it in his hand. She didn’t move or make a noise until he gathered it in three thick branches and began to twist it together in a shining braid. Then her hand shot up and caught his. He froze and started to pull back. They had this tacit agreement, she pretended not to see him, pretended not to know he was there, and he pretended he wasn’t hurting her by being there. Her hand closed a little tighter, but still gently.
“Please wait,” she said, without turning. He hesitated but didn’t pull any farther away. “I won’t try to change your mind. I won’t ask anything of you except that you listen,” she released his hand and felt the breath of a deep sigh flutter the strands of her hair. “All this time, I’ve listened to you, let you have your say. Don’t I deserve the same courtesy?”
And so much more, he thought, and buried his hands in her heavy hair again, plaiting it slowly as she talked.
“You warned me when we started, Solas. You warned me that this could only end in sorrow. You thought I’d regret it. Or that you would. I don’t know how it was before the Veil. I don’t know if you fell in love forever or if you were like the Avvar and only stayed with one another for as many years as it pleased both parties, but here, now, every love ends in sorrow. Even the best ones. Our time is finite, fleeting. One of us was always going to abandon the other, even if it was only through death.” She didn’t turn to look at him, but she felt his fingers shake as they brushed against the back of her neck, still threading strands of hair together. Her voice was thick and low as she continued. “I don’t regret it. If we were back on the balcony, if you were warning me again and I knew everything, everything, I’d do it again. Every second. Well, except maybe the orb. I might have smashed it myself to stop you, but I wouldn’t— I couldn’t avoid loving you. I wanted you to know that, I wanted you to stop carrying the weight of both of our sorrow. I choose to miss you. I choose to want you.”
He tried to twist the leather laces around the bottom of her smooth braid through the blur in his eyes. “I know we tried to save the world, I know you’re still trying to save it, in some way I can’t understand, but the best thing I ever did was love you. Because it brought me peace when I needed it most. Because it made you happy for a little while.”
He placed the brush beside him and drew her into his chest, closing his eyes as his lips brushed her ear. He still couldn’t bear to meet her eyes.
“There will be a world, Vhenan, a time, that will be whole, that will wipe this shadow existence away. I will find you there.”
She twisted her face toward him then. “You mean to undo it as we undid Redcliffe?”
“Yes.”
“Then I will not be me. And I will not know you.”
“You will become yourself, in time. You told me it was not the mark that made you.”
“It was not. It was you. And Varric. And Cassandra. And all the others. It will be the same as it was with Wisdom. Something may grow in my place, in time, but it will not be me.”
“If there were another way—”
She reached up and gently stopped his lips with her fingers. “I’ll find one,” she said and kissed him. And then she was gone, leaving him kneeling on the bed of a memory Skyhold as empty as the physical one.
Damn Dorian, he thought as he woke.