45. “I have never felt this way about anyone.”
I haven’t finished this romance yet and I don’t remember any of what I have done but I am vaguely sure that this is a line that Solas actually says, or something close to it. maybe.
There was a time that Asa really made an effort to be good with people. It hadn't come naturally to her but she had tried to learn all of those unspoken rules of conversation and interaction and catalog them and she had, for a time, been successful. She has good memories of the arlathvhen the year before she got her vallaslin - the year before the first time in her memory that Templars tried to come after the clan and one grabbed Esti by the wrist when she tried to throw fire at him and Asa cleaved the shemlen's head open and decided then that the clan didn't need another charismatic leader. What they needed was more the avatar of vengeance that she decided to become when she got Elgar'nan's vallaslin patterned on her face, with suspicion and a big sword at the ready. And it served her well enough right up until she fell out of the Fade with a mark on her hand that made the shemlen decide she was a leader.
And then it was trying to pull out all of those old lessons all over again to figure out how to interact with people. Varric, Sera, Bull, Dorian - it's easiest with them. They all brush off anyone else's attempts to probe their emotional depths or respond in kind to whenever she breaks out one of her flirting scripts because she can't remember how surface-level platonic friendliness is supposed to run.
She's been called inflexible by many people, which is good as a warrior, but bad as a leader, and especially bad when faced with an actual serious conversation about feelings. Romantic feelings, too, with her - lover? No, that word doesn't feel right, but she doesn't know what would, and she certainly doesn't know how she got here. It makes her feel only a little better that she's pretty sure Solas doesn't really know how they ended up at this point, either.
Which brings her to this moment, or the past several moments, since her brain wrapped itself around the words "I have never felt this way about anyone" and tried to figure out how she's supposed to respond to that.
Joke? No, no, bad: he's called her vhenan and she shouldn't brush this off, especially from someone as guarded as Solas tends to be. Opening up is good: do not ruin it with something like "yeah, I'm not surprised that you haven't" or a remark about that one time that Blackwall and Sera asked him if he's had relations with spirits.
Romantic confession of her own in turn? "I haven't either" isn't true, and "I love you" feels like too much. She's still grappling with what that might mean. What else is there besides those? There has to be more than those. What is the proper response here?
Shit, it's been an awkwardly long silence, the kind that he might be starting to interpret to mean that she doesn't have any feelings for him at all. She has to say something.
Fenedhis, that's not right.
"Wait, I mean - I'm bad with words is what I mean, first, I think you know that."
"Good, so I'm just going to - go back and pretend I said something like - I... am glad I met you?" That's not supposed to be a question. "I'm glad I met you. And I have feelings for you, too." Awkward weirdly formal phrasing, but Creators, why couldn't she have led with that? It would have worked well enough. "And it's pretty evident that I haven't had much practice at this with anyone either." Self-deprecation always works wherever comical vanity doesn't.
And now he's going to say something in response and she's going to have to balance herself again on the thin bridge of Appropriate Responses. Creators, she shouldn't wish that they were having this conversation, instead of on the balcony of her personal quarters in a castle that belongs to her overlooking snowy sunlit mountains, in the Hinterlands or the Storm Coast or anywhere where a bear attack could interrupt and save her.
I want everyone to know that Asa is really smooth whenever she’s jokingly flirting back and forth with Dorian, but then with Solas, Asa’s entire flirting technique was to just like singlehandedly take down a bear or a pack of Templars and then just kinda flex her arms and wink at Solas. the jury is still out on whether it’s worse that Asa thought this was a good idea, or that Solas was taken in by her anyway.
