#patch prompts

[ladyartanis]

Red Jenny’d

I’ve got another solavellan fic I’m working on and I’m excited for it. Preview under the cut.

Have to say, Sera is growing on me...

“...Soooo, Minaevey-weavy-bodeavy.” Sera slid across the bare expanse of desk to perch beside the elven researcher, grinning from ear to ear. Minaeve glanced up briefly from the concoction she was stirring and affected a disinterested expression. “What are you up to?”

“No.”

“No?”

“You came here looking for prank materials.” Minaeve very carefully measured out a small spoon of red powder before carefully pouring it into the syrupy looking mixture. The potion turned a vibrant, bloody red and thickened considerably. Sera sniffed at it curiously, dodging when Minaeve made a shooing motion at her.

“What is it?”

“Ink. Well...not ink. Paint, really. Like the kind the Avaar use. I was curious about how to make it indelible and I think I’ve finally figured it out. Noble ladies, you see, they complain when their lip colour washes off when they eat but with this...it’s very safe, not like vitaar, and it has practical applications for the Inquisition as well as a way to possibly make money-”

“Yeah? And you fixed it? What does idebi-bable mean?” Sera leaned over and stirred the ladle a bit, Minaeve now far too pleased with herself to chase off the overly curious Red Jenny.

“It means you can’t wash it off easily. I haven’t tested it yet but-”

“I can test it for you! Safe and stuff. Plus, it’ll be fun-”

“Wait, I can’t let you do that! Who are you going to prank with-Sera, I could-don’t-”

“Pfft, don’t be such a worry sport...You said it was safe, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, but-”

“And you can just say I stole it from you. Come on, Minnie-evey, life’s too short, yeah?”

“Fine. You can have some. But who are you going to use it on?”

“Whoever’s got the nicest lips, of course!”

“Ah! Not the First Enchanter-”

“What? Pish, no, I don’t want to get killed! But, don’t worry, I’ve got...plans.”

[ladyartanis]

Alright, posting this mostly because I’m wildly bored and I got sick of struggling with this one. Also, it finally fulfills(more or less) the last of my kiss prompts for patchworkpuppet! Back kiss, but also...sad elfy idiots. Solavellan. Post game. Solas angst and Fade dreams...

“I dreamed--and this dream was the finest-- That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you.” ~ Clive Barker

It wasn’t fair to do this. But Solas couldn’t stay away.

Besides, he was only guiding her dreams so they did not become nightmares...that was fine. His duty, even. Still, even he had to admit he was lingering. Lavellan had beautiful dreams, even if she wasn’t a mage. They were bright, detailed in a way he had not expected. And so, so beautiful. For she dreamt of what she imagined Elvehnan to have been, of the Arbor Wilds...of a world where elves had not been forced to live on the fringes of society in a world that had once been there’s. She dreamt of people that they both knew to be dead...of some he had never seen, but could get the sense of from her mind. Her mind would often stray but he tried to keep her in the fond reminiscences as much as he could, tried to keep her happy...

He watched his vhenan skirt all the pain of his leaving her with artfully constructed imaginings, building herself a world where the pains she had suffered did not exist. In the dream, he had not left her, a great failure resulting in the deaths of some of the Dalish who made guest appearances had not happened, Bull’s Chargers lived and loved and drank into perpetuity, eternally vivacious. Even Stroud was there, no longer looking so old and careworn. They were not the pale imitations of persons that would have littered a lesser mind but vibrant, clear and accurate. He supposed that he should not have been surprised when his shade began appearing and when she finally began picturing herself without her vallas’lin.

In this particular dream, they were in something similar to Mythal’s temple, the ruined gardens and paths of the penitent. It held some similarities to the Crossroads, Eluvians fading in and out of existence according to Lavellan’s attention and whims. This evening, she passed through one and he followed discreetly. If Lavellan ever sensed his presence, she had given no indication. Had she been a mage, he never would have dared to venture so close even though he might have longed to. It was an indulgence...but it was one of the few he allowed himself to have.

He entered Lavellan’s chamber, as beautifully furnished and spacious as he remembered. It was night in the dream, the slice of skyscape visible from the windows glittering with stars. The warm glow of torches and sconces lit the room’s interior with a diffuse light, the fireplace giving off a radiant heat. Lavellan stood on her balcony, dressed in a robe he remembered having been a gift from a visiting Antivan merchant, sea silk and soft as owl down. The robe was decorated with bare branch motifs and, because it was a dream and the Fade loved to lend details to what in reality would have remained boringly static, the branches were vibrant with golden leaves, a blanket of them littering the hem where it brushed her slim calves. Lycanae hugged herself against an imagined chill, the fabric of the open neckline sliding down to bare her shoulders and back. Moonlight kissed the curve of her neck with silver, gleaming across the white silk. She was heartbreakingly beautiful, even with her back turned.

Solas watched his shade stride toward her and before he could think better of the gesture, he dismissed the shadow of himself and stepped into it’s place. He stepped up behind her, sliding his arms around her waist to thread his fingers through her’s. Surely, you didn’t spend all of your time dreaming? Her smile in the sunlight in Haven, he remembered it all so vividly. He leaned back to press kisses to her nape, her shoulder blades and her spine as he held her waist and listened to her soft hum of pleasure.

Each brush of his lips against her skin is desperate and lingering, he wants the moment, the dream, to last forever. I found being awake, out of the Fade, troubling. She is warm and solid and true in his arms, even if his real body is safely ensconced behind barriers in a distant temple. Even if he is actually alone, all alone and far from her. He can see her in the Fade, even though he shouldn’t.You were always selfish, Fen’Harel. Falon’din laughs, a memory from a hundred thousand years away, all cruel smiles and cunning and a noble prideful thirst only slated by blood. Focus, you must focus. You cannot allow your thoughts to influence her dream…

The dream changes in accordance to Lavellan’s whim and suddenly he is sitting in the sun drenched gardens of Skyhold, winning at cards. She smiles at him from across the table and his breath catches, this is the first time he’s allowed himself to take the place of his shade and the feelings...a memory of watching Cole and Lavellan in the courtyard, a dalish elf and spirit conversing easily with one another. It’s better to help and then be gone. If I stay, it can be frightening. Lavellan’s gaze softening, shifting her weight from foot to foot, her voice full of compassion as she asks. For you or for them?

“It’s your move, ma sa lath.” Her face is bare, open and inviting as it always is when she plays. Lavellan has perfected the fine art of looking harmless while she cheats to win. There are greater sins and he does not love her less for her fondness for deception. He looks at his hand...changing it to suit his whims. He will let her win...it is her dream and she was always so confounded by his ability to beat her at Wicked Grace in the waking world.

He pulls a card and places it in his hand...a jester in motley, warped by the Fade to show an artistic depiction of Sera with her tongue out. 

“Elf takes elf just so bumping bits will mean something...”

He turns it over, he doesn’t like the mocking face that has no place in this dream. He sees what’s on the other side and drops it in shock. Lavellan, half of her face traced with Andruil’s markings, the other half blank and her laughing with tears rolling down her cheeks. Three arrows sprout from her breast, piercing her heart and leaving streams of blood running down her armour. The pool at her feet is the Vir Abelasan, it’s glittering water’s trickling through her fingers. Enough.

“If it’s that bad, you can put it at the bottom of the deck and shuffle them again.” Lavellan looks slightly troubled...Solas reorders his expression into something resembling impassivity, calming his mind.

“Alas, vhenan, my hand is dreadfully poor. I fear that I shall have to concede this round to you.” He can see, almost immediately, that he has done something wrong. Or something unexpected. Foolish to think he could step into the place of this fantasy version of him that exists and not make waves. Lavellan’s face falls, frowns. She lays down her cards and each one is as atrocious as it is terrifying.

“It cant be worse than mine, Solas.”

Swords, the suit of defeat. And in each there is something sorrowful: A young elven waif struggling to survive an unkind alienage, an elven mage with a Tranquil brand pressed to their forehead, a figure kneeling before a corrupted Eluvian and reaching to another residing within it. Sera hugging her knees, a broken bow beside her. And him, clutching the shattered orb to his chest before Lavellan, faceless in the helm she wears to hide her lack of vallas’lin. It is the People in their failures, godless and alone and dying...all of them dying and losing and suffering.

Because of him.

He is back on the balcony abruptly and it is pallid, purple grey dawn. Lavellan always had held a special hatred for dawn. Waking up early to hunt and to fish, I do not miss it. He had pointed out the amount of times he had caught her up at all hours, rising early despite her hatred for it. She had told him she did not sleep, could not sleep. That nightmares plagued her. She hated dawn because it signaled the failure to succumb to peaceful sleep, dawn heralded a long, difficult day ahead. In time, she had come to hate it for it meant waking and thus ending some of their most enjoyable times together. He felt her fingers wrap around his arm, a mirror of the gesture when they had first kissed in the waking world.

“You’ll have to hide better than that, ma lath. Or pay attention when you spy. You always win at cards...eventually. And you only call me ‘Inquisitor’ here.” She’s at his back and he knows the gesture is equal parts intimate and threatening. She is a huntress first and foremost and she has him cornered and flanked. He feels her step closer, closing the distance between them. Feels her arms wrap around him and feels her press her face against his shoulder. She is warm and solid and he feels himself shaking, wanting the moment to last forever. He deserves a knife between his ribs, not her embrace...

“I’m sorry-”

“For what? For keeping the nightmares away?” She presses her lips to his back through the fabric and he feels her soft exhalation. For a selfish moment, he lets himself believe that she is there in that distant ruin with him. That he will wake up to her smiling face, that he will kiss her in the morning.

“How long have you known that I was stalking your dreams, vhenan?” She laughed softly and he turns in her arms, cupping her cheek as the false sunrise turns titian and illuminates her sad smile. He runs a thumb over her lips, curses himself again and again for coming here. For disrupting her life as she tries to move on… she kisses the inside of his palm and her eyes sparkle the same colour as the Breach, tears welling at their edges.

“Who says I am not haunting your’s?” It has always been this way with her, always questions and misdirection and anything and everything to keep the maudlin and the serious at bay. He owes her the truth but in lieu of it, all he can do is yield to her whim. 

“Alas, so long as the music plays, we dance…”

“Ah, but of course.”

“I’ve always known. You were never very good at hiding, ma vehnan. Not from me.” She holds up her mark, letting it catch the sun in a beautiful, prismatic shimmer against her skin. His power thrums soft and insistent and he wonders if she feels that it belongs to him on some level, that she holds both his focii and his heart in the palm of one delicate hand.

“And you have not confronted me sooner?”

“Would you like to hear the honest answer or the pretty answer? In the honest one, I am a liar and a thief and a failure and these Fade dreams of you are all I’ll ever have so you cannot fault me for clinging to them like a child to impossibilities…” Dead leaves skate across the floor and off the edge of the balcony at her feet, the room behind them ancient and decaying.

“The pretty answer, the one I prefer? Some hunts are about the chase. And besides, I fall asleep-” A small, delicate white tree unfurled above the mark, bone white branches shifting in a phantom breeze. It was in her hand and yet also all around them, distant shadows of Eluvian’s and light through the mists as a lonely wind swept around him, silent but for a light susurration that whispers with the voices of the Vir Abelasan. “-I remember that I have felt you near me even in dreams-” Golden foliage, pure and brilliant as it was in the time of Arlathan budded and sprouted from the branch she held. Her hand shook and a beads of blood dripped from between her fingers, tears rolling down her cheeks as she looked at him. “-I consider chasing you away because it does hurt me to think that you can see and feel the contentment you force upon me with this dull repetition of happy dreams that make waking a misery and all I can feel from you is your despair-” The trees shed their leaves in a sudden gale, gold and silver and white shimmering and brilliant in the bittersweet air of the Fade. The white branches are bare as bones and the wind is cold against his skin. “-But then I never do. I do not even know if this is real or just another dream where I think I’ve caught you, that I’m speaking to you-”

“It is real. It was always real.” It had always been real for him, every moment. Every desperately stolen second spent in her presence, every intake of breath and sigh and kiss that he had coveted and cherished for it was more, so much more than the dreams in the Fade could be. 

“This isn’t real.”

“That is a matter of perspective...probably best discussed after you-”

“And then it is gone when I wake up. Like the People, like the Creators...like you.” Solas reaches for the tree still suspended above the mark, to bring back something of it’s former glory, only to watch it crumple to ash as he touches it. You ruin everything you touch, Dread Wolf.

“I will fix it. I will bring back what was. For you, for us, for the People.”  Lycanae looks up at him, her features shadowed by another’s, the tree that turned to ash is now tattooed across her face.

“Solas, it’s gone. All of it is gone. Even I can’t lie that away.” He cups her face in his hands, running his thumbs over the bare branch designs inscribed in her skin. She doesn’t understand, I can fix this, I will fix this. I left to fix everything. To restore our People’s glory...how to make her understand? He wipes away the tears streaming down her cheeks, smearing the bloody fresh vallas’lin across her skin. He tries to kiss away the fear and sorrow he sees in her face, the taste of copper and salt and rain on his tongue.

“Please vhenan-”

And then she is nothing, he is staring at a sky filled with familiar stars and grasping at air as he wakes with tears in his eyes and a sob stuck in his throat.

[ladyartanis]

Next on the Kiss Prompts: Forehead kiss. I made it sad and angsty. One more after this and then I'm going to reblog more prompt things because these were hard work but actually super fun and an excellent exercise.

“Please.” For the first time in a long time, Lavellan heard her voice break. It crumpled and scraped over the word as it fled her lips in a croak. She did not beg...Creators, she didn’t cry, either. She was known for that. Lavellan, master of the Orlesian game. Lavellan, proud huntress of the Clan. Fearless Inquisitor, leader of the Inquisition and Herald of Andraste. She detested the last one, but it was true. She could not have been reduced to this...to begging and pleading and tears.

“Lying to you will not make this easier.” Solas sounded just as desperate as she did and she felt bile rise in her throat. Not for you, maybe...

“Lying makes everything easier, vhenan.” She struggled to get the words to fight their way from her throat, to make her court ready smile appear. Lying to Solas was hard but made easier by the fact she knew how much he detested it. Be strong, be distant...do not let him see you break...

“You know that is not true.” His voice was absent of any emotion, bleak and barren and still. She laughed and it was the hollow, empty, courtly laugh that hurt her throat. She looked to where he stood by his desk, shoulders tense, gaze downcast.

“No. I don’t know anything. I don’t know what’s true and what’s false...I was a fool to think I did. I thought you loved me...you act like you do. But you won’t even tell me why. I...I trusted you. Solas, 'Pride'...I should have seen that coming, shouldn’t I?” He looked up at her, his expression agonised as he reached up and pressed the heels of his hands to his brow. No answer. “Why can’t you tell me why, Solas?”

“I can’t-”

“Actually, you don’t have to tell me why, it doesn’t matter.” She felt cold, lonely and rudderless in a way she had not since before the Conclave. There was a panic spiral happening inside her head, her confidence shaken to it’s very foundations. She felt like she was trying to climb an icy mountain and couldn’t find purchase, backsliding into doubt and fear and uncertainty.

Why? Because Solas didn’t love her? Because he’d left her? Because she couldn’t understand what she’d done wrong? Why he’d taken her vallas’lin and left her with nothing? If he’d displayed any hatred or malice...if he could just act in a way that made sense then she could just...move on. Plan. Think. Do something other than ineffectually heckle him with all her self-doubts and these horrible feelings of helplessness.

“Please, I just need one of us to lie. Because for the first time, I can’t lie to myself. I can't tell myself I don't love you. Please, Solas. Tell me that you don’t care…” She shut her eyes, no longer able to meet his without confessing even more weakness. It was pathetic. She was so good at fooling people, at fooling all of them. At being who the Inquisition needed her to be that day, that hour, that moment. She had only ever revealed herself to him; trusted him completely and utterly. And for what? Because she’d seen a pair of pointed ears and felt a kinship with him? Stupid. Stupid to think that she could ever have measured up to whatever delighted him so in the Fade. That she, ousted by her clan, the best hunter but also the most reckless; the gambler, the liar, the cheat and the bringer of bad luck to all but herself...to think that she could be loved, could deserve to be loved? Foolish.

She heard him approach, watched from the corner of eyes blurred with tears as he set down the book he had been reading beside a candle holder containing a feebly burning wick in a puddle of tallow and beeswax. She wanted to be angry, to rage and spit and curse him. But she was so tired and she had trusted him so much...she felt the gentle pressure of fingers under her chin, tipping her face up so  her eyes met his. She felt the warmth of a tear as it slid down her bare cheek. She couldn’t bear to look into people’s eyes now...she was so ashamed of her bare face.

Solas said nothing, did not demand she look at him. Did not speak the words she desperately begged to hear and the words that she knew would break her. Instead, he merely drew her forward into a gentle embrace, a tension to his body like a taut bowstring. His lips touched the place on her forehead where an arrow point had once been painstakingly inscribed, soft and reverent against her unadorned skin. A tentative hand at the back of her neck, his entire body trembling against her’s. She gasped in an attempt to stave off tears, savouring the smell of him, the warmth of his presence, too scared to say anything lest she cause him to pull back from her. She tentatively rested her palms on his chest, the soft knit fabric barely brushing her skin. Please, ma sa lath. Please don’t do this to me...to yourself.

Solas sucked in a sharp breath, pressed his lips to her forehead and then pulled away. She shut her eyes...unable to bear looking at him, unable to stand reading his expressions as they flitted between sorrow and regret and fear as they had for days. Her hands remained up, palms open and her mark prickling with pain. She closed her fingers and made fists, trying to cling to the feeling of his lips against her brow as she heard swift footsteps retreating, a door opening and slamming. She wrapped her arms around herself and shook with the effort it took not to scream or cry, deep cold settling itself around her like a shroud. She took deep breaths that tasted of paint and beeswax and old parchment, struggled with the emotions like a beast in a snare.

Why? Why. Why. Why.