There are several conversations before this where Lavellan and Solas grow closer, but I still think the conversation after she returns from the time-travel incident feels especially meaningful.
Lavellan does not simply say, “You’re special.” Instead, she tells him he is “not most people.” And somehow, I think that is exactly the kind of compliment that would reach Solas in this moment.
She even says she appreciates him not being most people.
Because after waking from uthenera, Solas must have known the loneliness of not being most people. He woke into a world that no longer remembered the truth he knew. When he tried to tell modern elves about the past, about the Veil, about being Fen’Harel, they did not believe him. He was even attacked for it.
So when Lavellan says she appreciates him not being most people, it feels like a quiet reversal of that loneliness.
The very thing that has isolated him — his difference, his distance from the world around him — is, for a moment, treated as something precious.
She is saying she is glad he is not like everyone else.
Glad that he is, in some quiet way, himself.
Maybe that’s a bit much, lol. But still.
And Solas, of course, answers by lightly deflecting with a joke about Orlesian fashion and magical surprises. But I think the softness still lands.
On the surface, it is such a quiet flirtation, carried through an intellectual exchange. But underneath, I feel like it touches something much older and lonelier in him.