Participate in Solassan week in any way you'd like! Make some art and post it during the week of March 9-15. We accept all types of fanworks as long as they are not AI-generated. Just tag this blog (@solassanweek) or use the #solassanweek2026 tag. You can optionally add your works to our Ao3 Collection
Please tag any NSFW or potentially triggering content
Prompts are also optional. Feel free to use all of them or none of them! Combine multiple prompts into a single work, or use the alternatives! We'll reblog it all the same.
You may also write NSFW content for the general prompts, and vice versa. Whatever ways the prompts inspire you to create Solassan fanworks is amazing!
Works do not need to be created during the actual week itself, but should be first posted during the period.
See you March 09-15 for Solassan Week! We're so excited to see what you all create!
Solassan week: FAQ | Ask the mods | Info Page
Prompts:
Day 1 (March 9th): Betrayal | Trust
Day 2 (March 10th): Spirits | Bodies
Day 3 (March 11th): Empire | Rebellion
Day 4 (March 12th): Yearning | Teasing
Day 5 (March 13th): Touch-Starved | Hedonism
Day 6 (March 14th): Farewell | Reunion
Day 7 (March 15th): History | Mythology
Alternatives: Vallaslin | Lone Wolf | When did I say I would save you?
'You really think that will make a difference?' Felassan says.
'It will,' Solas says, and then, 'I know it is - I am sorry, Fel. It is a terrible thing to ask of you. But this is the only way I can be sure you will be able to come with me.'
Felassan looks down. It's all fun and games until Solas gets intense and sincere, and then there's no resisting him. He could ask anything at all in that low, resonant voice and Felassan would give it to him.
---
The last of the Evanuris have retreated to a compound on Tearstone Island to direct the course of the war. Solas is on his way to Tevinter with his new lover Jacqueline Lavellan and his ex-lover Felassan to put an end to his enemies once and for all. His plan is foolproof, of course, but nonetheless things immediately begin to go wrong ...
I had good intentions to write something more substantial but life got in the way, anyway here's less than 200 words about some sad elves!!
The first time they sleep together, Solas kneels.
Fifty souls brought to freedom. A victory, or at least enough of one to open the wine. Enough to turn Solas' ears pink and his smile nearly genuine. A softness to his eyes Felassan has only seen once or twice. They've shared a hundred bottles after a hundred battles but not like this; Felassan intends to savor it. He takes his hand and pulls him to bed, perches on the edge, pulls him to stand between his legs. And then Solas drops to his knees and Felassan sees what he can only name as supplication.
"What's this?" Felassan laughs, confused, tilting up his chin with careful fingers.
A single moment where he looks taken aback. It smooths into flirtation. His hands come to rest, light, on Felassan's calves, warm through his footwraps. "Lie back," he says, unwinding them now, "and let me."
Felassan lets it go. But after, carding his fingers through Solas' hair, it settles in his chest like a knotted muscle, an ache behind his ribs, and he wonders.
This is a story in seven parts, one for each day! the whole thing is here
Somehow, against all odds, Solas makes it through. And somehow, impossibly, inadvisably, Felassan is still by his side.
After their last examination, the streets are full of students celebrating, shouting and laughter echoing loud and sharp beneath the arches. There are still daffodils in the flowerbeds, and the air tastes effervescent, saturated with supermarket champagne. Solas and Felassan bypass the celebrations and stumble together back to Felassan's room, which is now adorned with a row of little cacti along the windowsill and posters of hummingbirds on the wall. Solas still likes it much more than his own room, where too much pain lingers.
Felassan sweeps piles of now-redundant notes off the bed and they fall into it together; clumsy, clothes tossed haphazardly onto the floor, mouths and hands hot, urgent, grasping, shuddering against one another. For a little while, then, it's almost like it was in the beginning, when the whole thing still felt like an impossible miracle from someone else's life. Solas closes his eyes and kisses desperately, blindly, and he wishes so fiercely to remain there, to have always been there, to slough off the past and the future like broken, useless wings.
Then they lie curled beneath the covers. Felassan is holding him too tightly, as if he knows. The cheap blanket thrown over them is as scratchy as ever, still smelling of plastic even after thousands of washes, but there's a poignancy to it now; as if nostalgia is already setting in, though they haven't even departed yet.
Solas doesn't want to tell Felassan, but he knows he has to. As the night falls and the bells begin to ring, tolling ponderously through the purple gloaming, he gets out of bed and puts his clothes back on. The discarded notes waft beneath his feet like the white blossoms that fill the streets of Kinloch Hold in April, and Solas remembers their first spring, picking the petals out of Felassan's hair and kissing him for every one; how Felassan gazed at him with shining eyes and Solas wanted to say I love you but he couldn't because it was too soon, so he just kept saying 'I like you,' like an idiot, and Felassan laughed, hugged him, pressed their cheeks together, the crisp mineral scent of the sunshine on his skin -
He squeezes his eyes shut, steps over the notes. Solas organised those notes for Felassan, colour-coded them, highlighted important sections. He's tried so hard to give something back - the notes and the courses, the laundry, the chores. And whatever he can do with his mouth and his hands, anything, not enough.
Though, sometimes - he remembers Felassan grasping his shoulders, looking down at him, his eyes split by a bolt of silver-grey. Conflicted, almost distressed. 'You don't have to, Solas,' he said. 'I don't - ' and he broke off, gripped his own jaw with his hand as if trying to hold something together.
'I want to,' Solas said.
'Do you?' said Felassan, and Solas couldn't answer because he didn't even know what he wanted any longer, he just had to do something before he was crushed by the weight of everything he owed.
He squares his shoulders, closes his empty hands in a futile clasp so his nails dig into his palms. Then he turns around and shows Felassan the letter on his phone. An offer for a graduate position, in distant Rivain. It might as well be another world.
Felassan sits on his bed, cross-legged. 'I'd like to see Rivain,' he says, looking up at Solas. His eyes are bright with hope. 'Maybe I could get a job there too. We could move together.'
But Solas can't ask Felassan to come to Rivain with him. He's asked too much of him already. He's seen how it's weighed on Felassan - worry eating at him, weariness dragging dark hollows beneath his eyes, blue shadows jostling with the branches of his vallaslin.
Felassan has become so quiet. He's laughed so seldom, this last year. He used to laugh all the time - where has it gone?
The guilt coils thick and heavy in Solas' chest, snakes a burning tendril up his throat. 'I am not sure that would be a good idea,' he says stiffly.
Felassan doesn't even seem surprised. He curls his hands around the edge of the bed. 'Why not?' he says.
Solas looks down. He remembers his family: we can't watch you do this to yourself. Felassan shouldn't have to watch either. He's already seen too much.
Sometimes now when Felassan holds him Solas remembers other times: Felassan's arms around him when he was shaking through the night, Felassan's hands against his chest, finding ribs too close to the skin, Felassan crying quietly into his hair, asking him to try, please, to try …
He doesn't know how Felassan can stand to touch him after that. How he can stand to be with him. Solas can't even stand to be with himself.
Somehow he has to make it go away.
'It's better like this,' he says heavily, picking up his coat and turning it over and over in his hands. His fingers find the elbow where the tweed has worn thin, plucking uselessly at the protruding threads.
He can't go on with someone who remembers him like that. He has to leave it behind; draw a veil over the past, start again, become someone else.
He has to believe that's possible, still, even though his first attempt at a fresh start has worked out so badly.
Felassan is quiet. He doesn't plead. His eyes are a bruised, haunted indigo; he looks so very far away from the laughing, carefree boy that Solas remembers from that first autumnal day, and the guilt climbs higher, swallows the light. He can't endure the thought of what he's done to Felassan. The years he's stolen from him.
Felassan looks up at him, and the little tilt of his chin is so familiar it makes Solas' eyes sting. 'Who's going to look after you?' he says.
Solas has no answer, but the one thing he knows is that it should never have been Felassan's burden to bear.
It was impossible to ever fully acclimate one's self to Felassan's beauty, regardless of either proximity or familiarity. No matter how long one looked — and Solas had spent days of his life looking at Felassan — he could not become ordinary.
"No one we meet tonight will be looking at me," Solas said. "Not if it means having to take their eyes off you."
Felassan leaned into Solas, bracing his hands on the sink behind.
"I don't care about them. Where will your eyes be?"
- ☽ ☀ ☾ -
For the first time since he left for graduate school, Solas visits Felassan in the city where they met. Old habits reassert themselves and cracks begin to show.
With artwork by @mimi-maru. Read in full on AO3.
This story is part of the Overgrown series and takes place after Geltberg, though it can be read independently.
This is a story in seven parts, one for each day! the whole thing is here
At first Solas thinks he's safe now. He must be safe because Felassan loves him. Felassan loves him and that, surely, will fix everything.
But it doesn't.
For a while, at least, everything is good. Better than he could have imagined. Solas doesn't have to be alone in his little room with its recalcitrant smell of wet carpet any more; he sleeps in Felassan's bed most nights. The bed is a narrow single with a scratchy polyester blanket and they have to sleep practically on top of each other, which Solas pretends to be annoyed by, and when they kiss too vigorously there's a good chance someone will end up falling out of bed altogether.
It's all very silly and impractical and Solas has never felt so happy, so grateful, so unworthy.
He likes the winter that year. It feels close, cosy. The whole city smells of nutmeg, and the hard frosts leave white fractal patterns on the windows. The ice lingers; the cobblestones are still slick and perilous in February when Solas and Felassan go past the bookshop on the green and see that it's been festooned with strings of pink hearts, as well as displays of Randy Dowager novels stacked in cases. Solas feels strange, embarrassed, for reasons he does not entirely understand. 'It's a ridiculous holiday,' he says quickly, to demonstrate that he does not care.
Felassan shrugs. 'Ok,' he says, and if Solas is perhaps a little disappointed that he yields so easily, the feeling is quickly enough suppressed.
But when he wakes bleary-eyed in Felassan's bed and goes into the mildewed bathroom attached to the room, Felassan turns around, clad only in a towel, and beams at him. 'Good morning sleepyhead. Guess what day it is'
Solas frowns repressively. 'Fel - '
Felassan reaches out and draws a giant wobbly heart in the condensation on the mirror. It's ludicrous, cartoony and childish, like something drawn with crayons. Solas sighs heavily, to express exactly this sentiment.
Felassan writes 'S + F' inside the heart, messy and gleeful, then puts an arm around Solas' waist, leaning his head against Solas' temple. 'Come on,' he wheedles. 'Be my Valentine.'
'Felassan, honestly -'
Their reflected faces waver through the pearlescent mist: Felassan's goofy grin, Solas' valiant attempts not to smile. 'I got you chocolates,' Felassan says. 'You may hate Valentine's Day, but I know you don't hate chocolates.'
Now the smile is threatening to escape, so he has to turn his face to hide it in Felassan's hair. 'All right,' he concedes.
Felassan gives a whoop of victory, and it is ridiculous, truly, the whole thing is quite ridiculous. But Solas feels so utterly, breathlessly in love, and he makes an incoherent sound in the back of his throat, putting his arms around Felassan, and briefly he allows himself to imagine that they could stay right here, exactly like this; they could stay in this warm little room, untouchable, as if forever.
But he glances at the mirror - Fel's triumphant smile, and the heart melting, steam smearing the curves across the glass, seeping into a wash of spangled droplets. And a little agony whispers sharp and cold within him. Felassan doesn't realise, he can't see the way the light fragments, but Solas knows that the moment is already slipping away.
Like he told Felassan: it always comes back.
He doesn't know why. Just time, perhaps. But the war in his head gets worse, as it always does. The sounds get louder and the silences in between get sharper. One day he's all right, he's normal, he's exactly the way he's supposed to be, and then - brutal, sudden and incomprensible, he's not.
It comes back. And it's immense, catastrophic. It's so far beyond him that he cannot even imagine how to fight.
Kinloch Hold is different now. The spires loom over him, cruelly pointed; the bells in the evening echo too long, full of pain and portent. In the old stone he sees a papier-mache of griefs laid down by everyone who has ever lived here. This city is a battleground. It always was.
He stops sleeping in Felassan's room. He stops sleeping at all. He doesn't want to sleep because he always has to wake and remember what he is, and then he's pressed down and down and down by waves of blistering shame.
He hasn't been to a lecture in months. It doesn't matter; he writes the essays, he does the problems, he comes top of every class anyway. He feels barely alive, something shivered and hollow consuming him from the inside out, but no one notices that anything is wrong. No one but Felassan.
Sometimes it makes it worse that Felassan loves him. He shouldn't. Solas doesn't deserve it.
One evening when he's in bed, curled into himself, Felassan comes into his room and looks down at him, his jaw trembling. 'You can't keep going like this, Solas,' he says, his eyes too shiny. 'Maybe you should take some time off.'
Solas isn't going to take time off. He'll make it through to the end, no matter what it costs him. What is the point of him if he can't even do that?
He turns over. He's too thin these days. Even the mattress bruises him.
Felassan sits on the side of the bed. He gnaws at his lip. 'I love you,' he says, helpless. 'Please, Solas - '
Solas hasn't let Felassan near him for a long time. He couldn't stand the thought of it; Felassan's hands on his body would make him real and he doesn't want to be real. He wants to open up the air like an origami flower and disappear into it.
But now, suddenly, it's different. He can smell the salt of Felassan's sweat and his skin aches for touch. It's been so long. He moves back, and Felassan gives a shaky sigh of relief; he kicks off his shoes and crawls into the bed, fully dressed, wrapping his arms around Solas.
'You'll get better,' he says, his face pressed hot and damp into the crook of Solas' neck, his shoulders trembling. 'You'll get better. You will. I believe it.'
Solas closes his eyes and feels the heat of Felassan's body seeping into his bones. He feels Felassan's fierce, furious, unyielding love billowing all about him, too big and bright for that shadowed little room. It makes him ache. It makes him want to live.
But Felassan doesn't understand, he's never really understood. The world has always been so simple and kind and straightforward for him; in his eyes, everything is possible.
Sometimes Felassan's faith makes Solas feel strong, but more and more these days it just makes him feel ashamed. Felassan shouldn't believe in him. He doesn't know how to win the war.
“You should have seen me when I was younger. Hot-blooded and cocky, always ready to fight.”
After drawing a sketch of Solas with a mohawk, I decided I should also draw Felassan with a mohawk. The only thing missing is a drummer, but I haven't decided who that is yet. Felassan (bass), Solas (guitar, vocals). "Ar lasa mala revas" - it's written on Solas's T-shirt.
This is a story in seven parts, one for each day! the whole thing is here
Sitting at the desk beneath the emerald glass dome at the top of the library, Solas takes out his phone and reads the message from Felassan, down to the last line on the screen: I hope it's going well. I love
His heart skips a beat.
He scrolls to the next line: getting your emails.
Ah. Of course. He glances behind him, his shoulders hunched, and he feels shame crackling aross his skin - as if someone might have read his thoughts, as if they might even now be laughing at him for his presumption.
But no one's looking. No one's even here. The library is empty; it's the summer. He's stayed on in Kinloch Hold to help a professor with her research, but everyone else has gone home.
He reads the rest of the message, and puts the phone down, so it is almost swallowed up by the emerald light pouring over him. He misses Felassan more than he's ever missed anything in his life. They've been apart for nearly two months - Felassan is home with his family, and his parents don't like Solas. He's too formal, too reserved, always talking either too little or too much. Stuck-up, he heard Felassan's mother say the last time they visited. He thinks he's better than us, his father agreed, and Solas wanted to tell them that this was completely wrong, that it hurt him, but he couldn't think of any way to make them understand.
The truth was that he simply didn't know how to be in a place like that, in the midst of a real family. Their easy warmth felt alien to him. He doesn't have a family of his own any more; he broke it himself, tore his family apart with his own pain. No matter how small he tried to become he couldn't hold the jagged edges inside.
He remembers the house in Arlathan, the years that went by with his parents consumed by Solas' struggles, nothing to spare for anyone else. His brothers and sisters saw, and resented him for it. He cannot blame them.
He remembers, at the end, everyone looking at him with accusing eyes: We can't fight you any more. The house had been filled with laughter once - June and Andruil always pulling pranks, Sylaise egging them on, their father throwing his hands up and despairing over ever taming any of them. But the years of anxiety had drained the laughter away, fractured open ruptures beneath the surface. Solas' fault, of course.
We can't watch you do this to yourself, Mythal said, and he searched her face and saw no grief in it - merely a cold, flat resignation. He had pushed her love past breaking point, as she had always threatened that he would.
We're letting you go, she said, then; and that's exactly what they did.
So here he is, marooned for the summer in an empty city with nowhere else to go. He works diligently - days alone in the library, nights alone in his little room in college. The vacation feels interminable. But Felassan writes to him every day, and he writes back. A whole novel's worth of emails have passed between them by the time the summer's through.
Solas doesn't tell Felassan everything. Sometimes it's very hard; sometimes he feels the past too close, its hold on him too strong. But he can't say that. He promised to try.
The days are so long and the town is so still and silent and he's a small solitary figure cycling with his satchel through those sunlit winding streets, beneath the ancient arches. It's too quiet and the sound of his bicycle juddering over the uneven cobblestones isn't enough any more to drown the battles inside his head. He feels something bearing down upon him; he feels afraid.
But Felassan writes to him every day. Felassan sends him photos - lazy selfies beside the pool, smiling eyes, glittering collarbones.
Felassan's last email that summer ends with I love you.
Solas stares at it for at least half an hour to make sure it really says what he thinks it does, and then, with trembling fingers, he types I love you too and presses send. And then wonders, half-overjoyed and half-terrified, what he's done.
This is a story in seven parts, one for each day! the whole thing is here
When the spring vacation arrives Solas and Felassan take a train to Antiva together, carrying backpacks, staying in questionable hostels where they make the acquaintance of fellow travelers from all over Thedas. Felassan, of course, charms everyone he meets; Solas is simply happy to be along for the ride. If anyone asks they refer to themselves as friends, but Solas has a strong suspicion that the way they look at one another makes this story less than convincing.
In Treviso they sit at the edge of the canal, eating fried zucchini blossoms and drinking shockingly lurid orange beverages. The day is sweltering but they're under the shade of a laurel tree, and Felassan looks so pretty in the shifting, dappled light, his lips soft, his shoulders broad in his sleeveless T-shirt. Solas can't help it; he reaches out and with a finger he traces the line of Felassan's vallaslin across his cheek, sliding along the faint sheen of sweat there.
'Well that's not fair,' Felassan says, and then, as if inspired, he fishes a piece of ice out of his campari soda and leans in to run it across Solas' forehead.
'Excuse me!' Solas expostulates. The ice melts upon contact with his skin, water dripping down into his eyes. 'What was that for?'
'I'm giving you one to match,' Felassan says, and he touches the ice to Solas' face again, tracing out the spreading branches of his own vallaslin in shining, wet lines.
The ice is very cold but the day is so hot that it feels pleasant, shivery, a little frisson passing down Solas' spine. Despite himself he leans closer to Felassan, his lips parting. Water runs down his cheeks, down his neck, so his white T-shirt goes translucent and sticks to his chest. The vallaslin melts off his face, drips away from him, and for that moment, in the bright Antivan sun, Solas feels that he's been liberated; as if he could become someone else, as if he could be free.
Felassan looks at Solas for a long moment - water trickling down his throat, his shirt clinging to his shoulders - and then suddenly he says, 'Let's go back to the hostel.'
Solas blinks at him. 'Are you tired?' he asks, brow furrowed, but Felassan just laughs and takes his hand.
The dormitory is deserted - bunk-beds crammed too close together, luggage strewn on the floor, clothing hanging on the radiator. Felassan draws Solas down onto one of the beds; whispers in his ear what he wants to do.
Solas feels the blush rising to the tips of his ears. 'Someone could come in.'
'It's the middle of the day. They won't.'
Solas hesitates, their cheeks pressed together. Felassan's hands splay across his chest, tracing the places where the T-shirt is still wet. 'Look at that,' he says, nodding toward the window, through which they can see tall straight cypress trees and an arched stone bridge hovering over the river's misty purple. 'It's the most romantic place we'll ever be.' He looks sideways at Solas. 'You're nervous?'
Solas bristles. 'Don't be silly. Of course I'm not nervous.' He is. But he can see that Felassan is nervous too, and somehow that makes everything all right, so he lets Felassan peel the wet shirt from his body, reaches to take Felassan's shirt in return.
It's awkward at first, but there's warmth, there's laughter. Felassan keeps kissing him, little butterfly kisses pressed to his cheek and his temple; Felassan's voice in his ear murmuring only if you want to, it's all right, whatever you want, but Solas wants it all, he wants everything, he didn't know he was capable of wanting so much.
And then - it's nice, it's nice, it's nice. Solas didn't know it would be so nice. Afterwards he feels light and unbound, in disarray, lying cocooned under the covers with Felassan, both of them overflowing with bashful smiles. It seems so warm and safe. And so when Felassan passes a hand through his hair and whispers softly to him, somehow he finds all his secrets spilling out of him into the gentle twilight that has come over the room.
When he describes what happened to him, Felassan cries. Solas doesn't want Felassan to cry, not ever, but all the same it cracks something open within him. No one has ever looked at him like that before.
'You should not think - it is my fault,' he says, too quiet, mumbling.
'No it's not, Solas,' Felassan says, low and passionate. 'You can't think like that.'
No one's ever told Solas that before, either. Everyone always said it was his fault.
He huddles into the curve of Felassan's body and whispers an even deeper secret: it's still there, it always comes back, he'll never get away.
That makes Felassan cry more, but he cradles Solas' head into his chest, hands buried deep in his hair. 'I can help you,' he whispers. 'You'll be ok. I promise.'
He can't promise that. No one can promise that. But Solas thinks - hopeful, at least for that long, sweet dusk in Felassan's arms - that perhaps he doesn't have to do this alone.
I meant to post it yesterday for Day 2: Bodies, but didn't make it in time.
A little excerpt featuring an innocent make-out lesson between best friends under the cut.
"It's not complicated," he muttered, looking down at the yellow fruit in his hand, thumb pressing idly into the cut side. Juice shone briefly across his skin.
"No?"
"No." He hesitated. "People just make it weird."
Solas watched his finger sink once more into the pulp. "What exactly are you doing with that lemon?"
Felassan glanced up, caught out. His mouth tilted.
"Well," he said, "it's a good prop."
"A prop… for what?"
Color had risen faintly into his ears. "For my extremely rigorous scientific demonstration."
Solas should have looked away then. Any sensible person would have. He did not.
Felassan brought the lemon to his mouth.
…Yeah so had to go with the tragic option. Whoopsie. A day late, even.
Based off Ilya Repin’s Ivan The Terrible and His Son Ivan. I keep going back to TME and re-reading those last few pages…. I tend to imagine Solas having had a freakout and instantly regretting what he did, holding Felassan and trying to heal him with his weak-ass magic while whispering a million ir abelas………….
This is a story in seven parts, one for each day! The whole thing is here.
Through that first winter Solas and Felassan spend many long afternoons competing over problem sheets, followed by evenings huddled next to the fireplace in the pub, listening to the cantankerous crackle of the burning logs and slowly developing a taste for beer. Solas is secretly worried that these sessions might come to an end when the advanced math course finishes, but they find other excuses.
In early spring, after the last frost, the university organises a picnic. Solas protests that he has too much work to do, but Felassan rolls his eyes and drags him along anyway. It's still chilly and the sky is its usual morose Ferelden grey, but everyone is behaving as if it's the middle of summer - gaggles of students playing cricket by the river or passing tubs of sticky flapjacks between them, clutching dented plastic cups of Pimms adorned with mint and fat chunks of strawberry.
The drink makes Solas feel soft, fuzzy-headed, and when Felassan comes over to bring him another cup he beams unsteadily. 'Thank you,' he says, and then for some reason he feels an urgent need to say something else, so he touches Felassan's hand and says, sincere and halting, 'Fel, I - I just wanted to - you're the best person I know.'
Felassan looks up at him, wide-eyed, running a hand through the ripple of his dark hair. 'Oh!' he says. 'Thank you. I mean - I'm sorry, I don't think I feel the same way. But thanks.'
Solas stares at him, and a flush of hot shame rises through his body, his skin prickling in the cool mist coming off the grass. He had not even realised when he spoke that he was asking Felassan for something, but all of a sudden he understands that he was, and it's embarrassing, ludicrous, he has no right at all to ask for that.
The shame presses him down, crushes his ribs into his chest. 'I - ' he says, helpless.
Felassan's face softens, and he throws an arm around Solas' shoulder. 'I'm sorry,' he says, and then, 'Hey, look. Come play frisbee.'
Left to his own devices Solas would have elected to vanish and render himself unconscious for several millenia, but Felassan leads him firmly across the lawn and thrusts the frisbee into his hands. 'Come on,' he says. 'Show me how it's done.'
He's so kind and it just causes Solas to feel even softer and warmer towards him, which makes the whole thing worse. He throws the frisbee but he's awkward, angular and clumsy, his feet slipping and sliding over the wet grass. His body has never felt more alien to him and the frisbee doesn't go where he expects, he can't catch it, everything feels glassy and reflected and wrong.
That night in his poky little room in college he paces back and forth beside the open window, letting the chill in until the air is so cold it hurts him. His mind unspooling the months that he and Felassan have spent together - the linear algebra, the pub, the excuses. Seeing, now, what he's wanted all along.
Does he want Felassan, he wonders, or does he merely want to be whole? It doesn't matter. He can't have either.
But to Solas' relief nothing changes after that day; they simply go back to the rhythm of doing homework together, griping about lecturers, bickering about philosophy in the pub, where the long spring evenings have now rendered the fire unnecessary. Blossoms emerge across Kinloch Hold, carpeting the cobblestones in white, and students start taking boats out on the lake, laughter reflecting off the water all through the long glistening twilights.
And then, a few weeks later, Felassan suggests that they should go for a walk together. He's never proposed such a thing before, and Solas doesn't know quite what to make of it, but of course he agrees. So they walk around Kinloch's botanical garden, which is arranged in neatly cropped squares - prophet's laurel twining along a trellis, bushy felandaris, the roof of a greenhouse shimmering mint-green beyond a line of oak trees. There are too many scents in the air to be individually distinguished; floral and then pine and then underneath it all a sodden, heavy peat.
But the garden isn't very big, and they come to the end of the path before the awkwardness of the new activity has quite worn off. Felassan looks at his watch. 'Let's go around again.'
'I have to finish my metaphysics essay,' Solas protests.
'Yeah,' Felassan rubs a hand along the back of his neck. 'I know, just - come on, a little longer.'
Solas yields, shaking his head tolerantly, and they set off once more. Felassan is talking too fast, pausing, glancing at Solas and then walking on. Solas doesn't understand what is going on with him, but he follows willingly nonetheless.
This time, when they reach the end of the path, Felassan says, 'I know, let's walk around the lake!'
'Fel, I truly have to finish the essay.'
'You don't need the whole afternoon, surely. Or are you behind in the class?'
Solas blinks at him, ruffled and indignant. 'I have never been behind in any class!'
'Well then,' Felassan says firmly. 'Come on.'
Lake Calenhad is a tranquil, mirror-bright shimmer, stretching out toward the smudged mists on the horizon. The grass around it is absurdly green and wet, the path shaded by trembling birches stippled silver in the cool half-light. Halfway around Felassan comes to a halt and gestures at a place beneath a willow tree, shaded by leafy fronds and a little out of sight of the path. 'Let's sit down,' he says.
When Solas sits beside him he feels the dew seeping through his jeans, so the day seems to flicker strangely between too sunny and too cold. The smell of moss and wet slate rises from the water, and buttercups tremble as the breeze passes over them. Felassan clears his throat. 'What you said,' he says, still too quickly. 'I - well. It's always been girls before. I haven't, I mean, I didn't - '
'Fel?' Solas says uncertainly.
'I hadn't thought about you that way,' Felassan says, all in a rush. 'But I - um. Now I have. Been thinking, I mean.'
Solas stares at him. At first he's just completely lost, and then the realization hits him, but he can't quite believe it.
'Oh?' he says cautiously.
Felassan gazes back at him, his eyes a warm, glorious violet, his cheekbones gilded with tentative sunshine. 'I changed my mind,' he says, and then he leans in, and their mouths meet.
And Solas gasps against Felassan's lips, because all of a sudden he remembers that he doesn't know how to kiss. Often enough he feels weary, scarred, ancient, but there's so much that he still doesn't know - all of the time he should have been learning he spent instead at war with himself, with his body, with the world. He has no idea what to do.
But Felassan knows. Felassan guides him gently, his hand on the back of Solas' neck, his tongue running along Solas' lips. When Solas opens his mouth their teeth clash a little, but Felassan just laughs into the kiss and adjusts, his fingers burying themselves in Solas' hair. He tastes like those stupid butterscotch candies he's always eating and that fills Solas with a tremor of aching affection because it's so specific, so very Felassan, and he puts his tongue out and tries to lick the sugar from Felassan's mouth.
When they break apart, Felassan tips his head to one side, smiles fondly. 'Was that your first - '
Solas looks down, heat rising up his neck. Felassan grins. 'Yeah, I could tell.'
He scowls. 'Shut up.'
'Hey,' Felassan says, and he raises his hand to Solas' face again, his fingers finding the curve of Solas' jaw. 'It's ok. We can practice.'
Solas looks at him, uncertain, and then somehow - Solas isn't quite sure how it happens - he's lying in the grass and Felassan is propping himself over him, leaning in, and soon enough they are pressed together, kissing clumsily, sweetly, surrounded by tumbles of birdsong and the sounds of moving water. Solas is conscious of Felassan's chest flush against his, a warm, comforting weight, and he feels brilliantly alive and present, as if he belongs in his skin at last, as if his body finally makes sense to him.
The long grass waves around them, the sun dips low in the sky. Felassan's mouth on his, Felassan's hands in his hair, Felassan, Felassan, Felassan -
