#...leliana just sitting there with a dalish baby on her knee as she leads the talks as divine victoria

[nightingaletrash]

local single mother wishes that grown ass adults would be less petulant than her toddler

[pigeontheoneandonly]

Serendipity

I saw a reply to a post over @ao3commentoftheday suggesting it’s impossible to write a slow burn in less than 10k words.  My dumbass brain took this as “challenge accepted”. Who knows if I hit the mark, but I’m pretty happy with the result!  This baby clocks in at 2487 words.  Tucked under a read more, because that’s still a lot for tumblr.

Fandom: Dragon Age

When we met, I couldn’t see any part of you beneath the mud you’d earned trying to kill me. I don’t know why I took you with us, except that you were an elf without anywhere to go, and in Ferelden an elf with no home was good as dead, and we just don’t do that to each other. Naturally none of the shems understood. I bound up your wounds alone, thinking it would’ve been easier if you’d just fucking died.

The first prick of sympathy came when we arrived at the Dalish camp.  You called me my dear warden, mocking the double-meaning of my title and your technical captivity.  You flirted shamelessly with me the whole way, undeterred by my gender or my cold silence, and put me in a bad mood because I couldn’t tell if it was genuine interest, or something you felt you had to do, offer yourself to me, to stay in my good graces.  With a man for sale it could go either way.  But I saw how your ears went red and your tongue fell silent, when our wilder cousins sniggered at your tattoos, your so-called “city vallaslin”.  It’s horrible to be an in-between, unwanted alike by the society that spawned you and the one you live with, to be lumped in with those who keep you in squalor and kill you at will.  Watching their whispers subdue you angered me more than all the flirting put together. And fuck, wasn’t that annoying.

I bought you a pair of gloves.  I don’t know why.  They didn’t deserve my money, you didn’t deserve my kindness, but you looked at their tooled leather like you were reading a secret map, and I had to know what you saw written there.  You didn’t say thank you.  But you told me your mother was Dalish.  I told you mine had died.  I told you how she died, even though that’s a thing I don’t tell anyone, because my mouth moved before my mind could scream stop.  

You made a joke.  I shoved you hard into the underbrush and stalked away before I killed you.  We never talked about it again.

In fact, we barely spoke at all, the whole long, rainy road to Orzammar.  We didn’t speak through the political battle, we didn’t speak cooped up for days in a king’s mansion, and we didn’t speak as the heavy stone gates of the deep roads clanged shut behind us.  

I had been a Warden for all of eight weeks.  Alistair warned me that Wardens Joined in a Blight always were more sensitive, and all my newfound awareness remained raw as a fresh-hewn board.  In the deep, I could hear them everywhere. Feel them, crawling through my skin like worms; smell them in the still and sour air.  I could fucking taste them when we stopped to rest and I had no distraction.  

The dwarves told me this was where Wardens went to die.  I hugged my knees in the weak torchlight of our camp, feeling myself lost in the dark with them pressing in all around me, until they tore me apart, and for the first time, I hoped the Blight would kill me.  Sleep was a fantasy.  It showed, more and more, the deeper we went.

I didn’t notice the first time you offered to carry my knapsack, so tired I gave it over without question, numb to anything but the need to keep walking.  The occasional darkspawn nest was a respite. Better to fight them than sense them waiting, a constant pressure of millions of eyes on the back of my neck.

I didn’t notice when you started staying up with me.  I figured you weren’t tired, either.  I still wasn’t speaking.  But you rambled, about your childhood, about your exploits with the Crows, reciting snippets of awful Antivan poetry and singing bawdy songs you couldn’t quite remember.  But it came as a shock when I woke up, the first I’d slept since we entered the roads, curled up against the cave wall, beside you.  You smiled, still awake.  Wished me good morning.

We fucked for the first time the first night we camped above ground again, drunk on dwarven ale and being out of that thrice-damned hole, that endless crushing darkness.  In the morning we agreed it didn’t mean anything. Just the mindless choice of two bodies almost sick with relief.

You flirted less, after that.  I talked more.  I told you about coming up to the sealed gates of the Denerim alienage, hearing the word purge from the indifferent shem guard, and how I still didn’t know if my father or Shianni or any one of  these people who’d been my entire world were alive.  The ridiculous story I made up for those two kids, because elves survive on hope.  My absolute disaster of a wedding, doomed long before the kidnapping; I was all my father had left, and the truth, that my  inclinations were not reproductively compatible, would have crushed him.  That if I closed my eyes, I could still feel a ghost of euphoria remembering my sword plunging into Vaughan’s gut, that I was only sorry I only got to do it once.

I don’t know why you listened.  Put together, the whole thing rang absurd, not very sane and certainly not much like a Warden.

I do know that when the sloth demon snared us in nightmares, and I saw you stretched on that rack, my vision went red.  When I came back to myself, your brother Crows were in pieces and you were gone. A little of whatever-the-fuck that was lingered when we woke; I took two running steps toward you, so damn happy to see you without joints popped and bruised.  You stumbled one step back, on instinct, a portrait of humiliation.  I faltered and the moment died.

You moved back to your own tent.  We’d taken to sleeping side-by-side.  The nights grew colder as the season waned, and the Blight spread, and the presence of another body in the night was an affordable comfort.  I stared at the large space you left behind, startled to miss you this much.

Things stayed like that as we marched back to Denerim for the Landsmeet.  Cordial, but distant.  Hurt without reason and annoyed over it, to the point that Leliana warned me that compelling a Landsmeet as an elf would be hard enough without a pissy attitude.  Maybe that was why it was so easy for Anora to betray us, because irritation makes me impatient and rude.  But you snuck and charmed your way through the most heavily fortified prison in Ferelden to get us out— to get me out.  And somehow I was still annoyed.  

I said you must be really hard up for protection.  You crowded me into the wall.  For a wild moment I thought you’d shank me, and then for an even more terrifying one, that you’d kiss me.  Instead, you told me to consider your blood debt paid, and shoved off down the street. Angry as I’d ever seen you.

And what was worse, you stayed angry, and I stayed on edge, and maybe that’s how we got jumped by a dozen Crows in a dead-end alley, one of your bad decisions come home to roost in earnest.  Their leader offered to wipe your slate, to take you back to Antiva, make up a story and let you go home.  Not like an order, but like a friend, offering you a way out.

You looked at me.  Months on the road, and I couldn’t read your face.  And what I remember isn’t thinking I was about to die, but that I was about to lose you to this smug shem jackass, of all people.  

Then you said no.  And the shit hit the wall.  

We lived, somehow.  Your old friend went down last, and hard, your Crow-hilted dagger quivering between his ribs as his heart pumped itself out.  You fell down beside him.  Uninjured beyond a few nasty scratches, curled into a ball on the cobbles like you were dying, too.  

I asked something that amounted to what the fuck.  And it all came pouring out.  You grew up together, you and him and some girl named Rinna, a little family inside the unending terror of Crow education.  If you couldn’t love the Crows, you could love them, and for a time the comfortable rewards of your harsh training were made sweeter by their sharing.  Until Rinna betrayed you to a mark.

He killed her while you watched, you told me, your head in my lap.  While she begged your help, you taunted her.  She died with her love for you on her lips.  You both went forward with the job, a loose end to clean up, and discovered there proof of Rinna’s honesty, her fidelity. You killed her together and now you’d killed him, too.

The silence stretched as the torrent of words finally stopped.  Feeling your face damp on my leg.  There was nothing to say, but that silence was a wounding kind, so I told you the stupid story about the bluebird in the vhenadahl. Recited rhymes we used to sing as kids, playing hopscotch and tag in the dirt.    On and on, until the sun slipped below the buildings, and you were able to sit up, and we left.

It never came up between us again.  In fact, very little had changed.  A mild thaw in an undercurrent neither of us wanted to address.  It seemed impossible we’d be able to swim it; diving in could only lead to drowning.

Returning to the alienage put it out of my mind.  My family spared by the purge, but still not safe.  Murder and disease and hints of darker things make good distractions. When we discovered elves were disappearing, you volunteered to scout, as you had so many times before.  I thought nothing of it.  Until I was sitting up alone at my childhood dinner table, more than a day past when you should have returned, too paralyzed to do more than stare at the door and plead with the Maker or the gods or whoever might be listening for you to walk through it.

Sometime after midnight, you finally did.  You caught sight of me, and tendered a look of exasperation.  My dear warden, you said again, chiding this time, and before you could continue I flung my arms around your neck, too tight for you to get anything else out.  And we stood still there, like that, because if I let go I’d slap you. I hated you.  You were the most important person in my world, and if you died it would change me, and I hated you for it.

We went into that warehouse together, and pulled people— my people— out of cages together.  We read the manifest of those already sold away.  You put your arms around me, when I stepped into an alley after it was done and screamed and screamed and screamed into my own hands, because even if we somehow got justice this time, there was no undoing it, and no way to stop it happening again.  Because this was the Black City we all had to live in.  You told me then that you’d been sold, too, into a different fate but one ugly in its own way.  And my hand slipped into yours where it wrapped around my chest, just for a moment, until someone called us back to the mess we’d made.

You watched as I took the bastard Loghain’s head, and if it didn’t feel like justice for my kin, it did feel good.  You stood beside me as I promised a collection of the most powerful people in Ferelden, shems all, that I could save their country, and hours later, when I was sick back at the manor where we stayed.

You weren’t there when Riordan told me I was going to die.  It’s hard to remember now how out-of-our-minds, slap-happy with relief Alistair and I were when he showed up, fucking finally a senior warden who knew what he was doing.  That went up like a matchstick when he explained a grey warden giving their life to contain the archdemon was the only way to end the Blight.  He said some other things after that, but I didn’t hear them over the sound of one solitary thought:  I cannot put Zev through that again.  I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…

And you weren’t there when Morrigan caught me as I shambled from that room, weak with shock and grief.  You weren’t there when she told me there was a way out.  You weren’t there to see my revulsion— not at what she suggested, but at myself, because I knew my answer immediately.  I could not do that to you, not even with the entire world in the balance. That whatever the consequences, whatever pain this brought on me or on the child to come, if it spared you another heartbreak, the price felt fair.

I stumbled to your room no more than half-dressed.  You smelled the sex on me immediately.  Your face twisting with hurt and rage, until I fell down at your feet, my head on your knees, and told you everything.  What waited for us in the heart of the Blight.  The blood magic Morrigan wrought.  That I’d done it for you, that I begged your forgiveness, that if you left now I’d never be the same and please, please, Maker, please stay.

Your hand lifted my chin.  Your expression like I’d never seen before, tender and fond and something else. Something electric.  Your voice a whisper.  “My dear warden…”

“I love you,” I said.  It was what I’d been trying to say through all the incoherent babble.  Maybe for a lot longer than just this night.

You bent and kissed me.  And in the softness of your mouth, every worry and doubt melted away.

We’d seen each other many times before.  But you never trailed your thumb slowly across my every scar, from the faded wounds of Ostagar to the scrape from just this morning.  I never traced over the swirls of your tattoos with my tongue. We never drifted back to each other every other moment for a lingering wet kiss, never burrowed a face into a neck or tangled our legs or clung so close together that we seemed more one person than two.  It never felt right, not like this.  

And as I looked into your face in the dying firelight, brushing my fingers over your cheek, I thought about you covered in mud and pain and waiting to die.  Maybe the world didn’t care about us, but in its making, if there was just enough serendipity to let me find you, maybe that was all the care I needed.

[gus-dont-be-canada]

[More] Jim the Scout

When he had first stepped through the gates of Skyhold, Jim had been little more than a boy. On the outside, twenty-five years old, a fuzz of stubble darkening his chin and jawline after days spent walking, sleeping, then more walking. They walked mostly in a single line, some stragglers at the end nearly rendered invisible by the swirling gusts of wind and snow—no, not snow. Ash. Snow was different. Snow brought back memories of laughter, happiness, snapshots of billowing clouds of warm breath slipping from between pink lips pulled back into a smile. Snow was chasing his sister through the fields of Redcliffe and slipping on an unseen patch of smooth, crystalline ice. The resulting scrape had stung as fresh drops of blood welled to the surface, staining the knee of his pants—and boy, Mother would really have a row with him about that later, just you wait—until his sister had sauntered forward, her cheeks flushed and curls of dark hair peeking out from below her hood. She had smiled and held out a hand, which he grasped firmly, and she pulled him up. Instead of teasing him, or babying him like she did some of the younger children in the village, she had dragged him behind her to the nearby blacksmith’s shop. The old man who owned it was out—no doubt harping to the first person he could find about late deliveries or the poor quality of the local ore—but his daughter, saved by the Hero of Fereldan only a few years ago, had let them inside. Jim had fallen asleep on the pelt carpet in front of the forge, still warm as it glowed with coals from the morning’s metalworking, and his sister had taken off her jacket and let him use it as a pillow. While he napped lazily before the fire, she and the blacksmith’s daughter had cleaned and bandaged his knee.  

That was snow.  

The ash that swirled over the mountaintop now was impossible. It had to be. How could it flow so freely, dance in the air with the slightest twist of the breeze or exhalation of breath? Each little gray fleck felt like lead when it landed on his shoulder, as if the names of those they’d lost in the attack on Haven had been written in ink across its surface, its weight increasing exponentially with each consecutive life until Jim felt that he would sink straight into the impostor snow and never rise again. He doubted whether he’d have the strength. Every night when they made camp, a bedraggled lot whose prays never seemed to be answered—least of all heard—he had laid in his makeshift bedroll and listened to the breathing of his fellow soldiers as he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Sometimes the breathing was ragged, quick, and broke off with a start as someone jerked to consciousness, a question mark poised on his lips as the remnants of a nightmare floated away on the plumes of warm breath and he struggled to recall where he was, who he was, whether he was still alive or not. Whether he should be.  

There had been a lot of that.  

Other times, the breathing was quiet, each soldier lying on his respective cot, each replaying the events that had transpired that fateful day when Corypheus attacked. Each of them wondered what he could have done differently, what he should have done better. Would the young woman who had fetched the water everyday still be alive if they had spotted the army marching just a few moments sooner? Would she still be alive if Jim had kept his Inquisition-issued sword at his side at all times, instead of in the armory, like they were supposed to? Even in the dead of night, Jim knew none of the soldiers were sleeping. They kept their eyes open, focused on the threadbare, tattered threads of the tents over their heads. They kept their eyes open until they stung, and tears welled and rolled down the sides of their faces, tickling their ears and wetting the fabric of their makeshift pillows. Jim knew they did this, because he did this, too.  

On the nights when the grief and the guilt were so thick in the air as to be palpable, stifling and smothering, Jim had liked to escape to the tent and sit on the outskirts of the camp, watching and forcibly reminding himself to celebrate the lives they had managed to save—and chastising himself when he forgot. Self-loathing sat like a rock in his stomach. He would have given his life for any person in that town, Inquisition agent or not. If he could go back now, he would have shoved the water girl out of the way of the arc of that swinging sword, felt the hot slice of agony as it cleaved him in two, and died knowing he had saved her. Instead he had frozen, terror locking his knees as he saw the flash of the silver blade, held high overhead, and her screams shattered any remnant of bravery in his being. He hadn’t even known her name.  

On those nights, he sat on the edge of camp, just outside of the ring of orange light cast on the sooty snow by the campfire. The snow melted and wet the bottom of his pants, but he hadn’t seemed to notice. If he had, he wouldn’t have cared. He kept his eyes on the ring of small stones surrounding the fire, unblinking. Commander Cullen had worried the few rocks they had found would not conceal the campfire from scouting parties, and he was right. They were in plain sight to anyone who happened to crest the peak of the nearest mountain. They had almost sent out another group of scouts to find more stones to hide the flames, until the spymaster had said something that had made everyone’s blood run cold.  

“Do not bother to hide it,” Leliana had said in a grim, monotonous voice. “If they want us, they will find us with or without some measly fire. If they come, they come, and they will kill us all.”  

Every night the Herald and the Inquisition’s highest advisors gathered around one of the makeshift benches beside the fire. It was far from the grand table they had used in Haven, which Jim had seen once or twice when he had brought reports from Scout Harding to the Seeker. On such occasions, he had never lingered long; he did not have so much pride as to deny the fact that Seeker Pentaghast intimidated him. He had heard stories about her and her family from the other soldiers, men and women who had been there since the start, and whenever he found himself around her his tongue felt like cotton in his mouth, thick and unwieldy.  

The sight of the Lavellan girl’s head bent over the creased and soot- and blood-stained maps filled him with hope to a degree he dared not admit. She was pretty, and her hair kept slipping out from behind her ear when she bent over the documents. Her brows creased as she turned and exchanged words in a low whisper with the advisors. Cassandra crossed her arms over her chest and Leliana stared, not with hostility, but a degree of focus so sharp Jim could practically see the gears in her head turning. No one knew where the Herald had come from, and she blushed when they called her that, still not having gotten used to the title. Certainly it was strange, even more so with her being Dalish. Still, she had done incredible things for the Inquisition, had given to the Inquisition without any thought for herself or any wish for reward. 

Jim clenched his hands into fists. He knew beyond doubt that if she had been there, instead of fighting at the front by the commander, she would have given her life for the water girl’s.

The commander ran a heavy hand over his face, then massaged the back of his neck. While many of the soldiers had been quiet the past few days, he had given orders confidently and smartly. The commander was not a man easily swayed—not after what he had been through at the Circle and in Kirkwall. Jim knew only the barest bones of his story; while he had never striven to hide his past from the recruits, the commander neither had encouraged it. The one recruit who had dared to ask had been met with a clipped reply before Cullen had partnered them for practice. There was simply no time for telling sob stories, and nowadays, everyone had one.  

Jim respected the commander, liked him even. He was strong. Confident. Everything Jim had wished to be when he was a little boy playing knights outside the Chantry. Jim had no doubt he would be one to lead the Inquisition to victory, but for the moment, that day seemed very, very far away.