Valentine's Alphabet I and X for Lavellan, please :)
I love these for her. They are so good. This has been A Theme, for her. She did not realize she was aro ace until after she got into the Fade.
I : I LOVE YOU. does your muse find ‘i love you’ easy or hard to say?
She finds it very easy to say to her friends, and very hard to say to Solas because she feels like it's not the right thing, and what she means isn't what he means, and it's been a Thing for her. Ar lath ma is for Solas, but she almost always dances around the actual saying of it. It's our love, 'Var lath vir suledin', and parroting his words back to him with the 'banal nadas, ar lath ma, vhenan'.
This excerpt happened in Chapter 7 of Molten as the Sun.
“Ar lath ma, vhenan,” he said, reaching for her hand. “My feelings for you will never change.”
And her hand lay in his as if the hand of flesh and blood had been the wooden. He released it. He realized that she had not spoken of her love, had only ever spoken of their love.
“You care, as you did,” he said diffidently, as if he spoke only of some triviality, as if the answer did not matter more than anything in the world or the Fade. “Do you love?”
She looked at him, a wild thing cornered, tense for a blink of a moment and then smiled and pressed his hand.
She was adept at evasion, but he had practiced the art for centuries, for countless ages, and he was aware of what she was doing now. How she struggled to lie directly in words, but would evade, would speak around a subject, would deceive with body and face and gesture, when she did not want to wound.
“That is not quite an answer,” he said, gently.
“I don’t know,” she said, helplessly. “I thought I did.”
The water was boiling. He got up heavily to pour it into the pot for the sake of having something, anything to do.
“Let me do that,” she said, “you’re terrible at making tea.”
It was a grotesque parody of a domesticity that might have been, that he had desperately wanted and was now out of reach.
He stood there, miserable, as she bent to her task less gracefully than he was accustomed to, jerkily pouring water into the large mug, pouring it from the mug into the cups before tipping most of the contents of the little saucer into the warm mug, spilling a little, raising her nose to catch the smell of the warmed leaves in the mug, tipping the water messily from the cups back into the mug. She waited a few more moments for the tea to steep, strained it out with the saucer into the cups, added a healthy dollop of honey into one of the cups and offered it to him.
He took it and sat, staring into the curling steam, the cup in his almost imperceptibly trembling hands the only source of warmth in the world. She sat beside him, curling herself against the foreleg of his own grief-stricken statue.
“I thought I loved you,” she said. “I still do. I don’t know if it’s right,” and he thought that this made no sense, that she loved him, but she didn’t know if it was right. Or perhaps it did, after all. He felt that she was right to doubt her correctness in loving him. It must surely seem some kind of a transgression to love him, who had destroyed their people, sought to take down the Veil, taken her hand. Who had shown himself, so many times, to have failed in loving her as she deserved.
“No,” he said, numbly, “I imagine you would not. I… I have done little to give you confidence.”
“No,” she replied, “I mean I don’t know if I know what love is. Romantic love? I thought I did, but I think I might have been wrong.”
He looked up, entirely lost. “It is a feeling?” he asked.
“Yes, but how do you know what feeling it is unless you can define it?” she returned his question. “ I know you love me, and I think I love you, but I don’t know if you agree, if we feel the same thing.”
X : XOXO. does your muse use / like pet names?
Solas' name is Solas, and she figures that being called Solas is very important to him. A reminder that she sees him as himself. And she likes 'vhenan', from Solas, but she only uses 'vhenan' back strategically, when she's making the point that she cares for him, and it's my bondmate, not my friend.
