Draga @drownedstarlight requested for Lara:
🌾 Describe your OC through the eyes of someone absolutely head-over-heels in love with them
This is Solas’s perspective from Chapter 19 of QVT, in which Lara is forced to stay at his place because of her very broken leg.
She didn’t seem to notice him as he stood in the doorway of his guest-bedroom. Tired as he was, he contented himself to lean against the doorframe while she worked. After being awoken in the night, and once Lara was deeply asleep again, head pressed against his arm, he extricated himself to hide away his art and keepsakes and rearrange the furniture so she would be able to move around whilst in her chair. He had taken a moment before leaving to push the hair out of her face. Thick locks, blacker than the darkness around them, and he longed to bury his hand in them and hold her closer, press her to his chest and breathe her in until he forgot about the events of the past week.
But he could not do that, so instead he’d applied her white plastic sheets to his wall, and as Ella had promised, upon waking Lara immediately got to work on them with her markers. He didn’t understand the equations she was writing, nor the notes she added with little arrows. She clearly had her own sort of shorthand. He wondered between the surgery and the drugs they gave her when she’d had the time to think of whatever she was writing down. His own mind felt like a fog, and though the fear had mostly dissipated, he still keenly felt its shadow.
It had been close, her explosion into the Fade. But worse was watching her struggle to breathe on that hospital bed. His magic did what it could, but it was not enough. Not without lyrium or rest. Fading in and out of consciousness, her body beaten and bruised, she looked small. Her presence took up so much of his mind he had barely registered that she was short. Unmuscled. Fragile. And he refused to let her succumb. Her life had barely started. Their scarce time together was never enough, but this time it had hardly even begun. There was still so much to learn about her.
Months of flirtation, and he relished in how easily flustered she was. She wore every expression on her face, brighter than her vallaslin. Disgust at accidentally choosing the decaffeinated coffee at seminar, delight when her students were clever, confused caution every time a kindness was bestowed on her. A few simple yet carefully chosen words from him, and her eyes widened and then narrowed, surprise followed by her full attention. He could lose himself in those eyes, dark yet splashed with honey, golden, shining in her cutting intelligence. He liked her best of all when she was teaching. The moment right after a question was asked, he could see her mind working, a puzzle being solved in seconds, then her gaze snapped up, and she always smiled just before she began her answer.
He wanted to ask her everything. He wanted to know what she thought about everything. Her favorite season, the best way to spend a rainy day, how best to overthrow the elite of Orlais, which foods offended her most. What was on her mind at any moment, at all moments.
He had already ascertained that her favorite kind of coffee was simply more coffee, and he dutifully brewed it while watching her work. Was it inspiration that drove her? A desire to return to normalcy? To forget the events of the week? Or had she simply encountered a puzzle too tempting it could not wait a moment longer? She’d filled half the sheet, and now was stretching over the chair to keep writing on the lower portion.
“Lara are you hungry?” He hadn’t meant to startle her, but her pen snapped across the page, an orange streak marking her surprise.
“Are you an average mage?” she replied without turning around. He glanced over her work again, wondering if one of the symbols in it stood for him. He felt oddly flattered by the thought. “Are you particularly powerful?” she continued, and though he could not see her face, it was her hands that belied her irritation, “More mana than others? Better energy output?”
She twisted the cap to her pen around and around as she spoke, her agitation increasing with his answers. Clearly his magical output did not align with the laws of the universe as she understood them. She would simply have to write new ones, and he had no doubt she was up to the task. With a wave she dismissed him, rolling herself to a fresh sheet of plastic.
He left her to make breakfast, unsurprised she was still at it by the time the pancakes were ready. He leaned on the door again, knowing that if he were lucky, this would be just the first of many times he saw her at work. When her marker paused, he asked, “Could I interest you in a late breakfast?”
She groaned, ready to refuse him, but the scent of pancakes brought her around. She looked tired and confused, her hair an adorable mess, but he did not miss the way her eyes traveled the length of him, a hunger there for more than just pancakes. She swallowed. Solas wondered if he was any better at hiding his smile than she was at hiding her attraction to him. He couldn’t deny it felt good.
She was safe here, no one threatening to end the world anymore, and he was in no rush to start a romantic relationship while she convalesced. Still, as she ate, he could imagine many more mornings of making her breakfast while she rewrote the laws of reality. A lifetime of them, perhaps. If he was lucky. Her eyes lit up as she enjoyed her pancakes, and his heart ached with hope that once again he would be lucky.
This one is also on AO3 in Entanglement!
