Okay but what if Solas gets freed earlier than the big bad final fight (like we speculate) and he uses his Dread Wolf form in occasional pinches of combat?
And what if he has a moment where he has to deliberately choose his commitment to Rook like he had to do with the Inquisitor? (I'll utilize mine for this case.)
Walk with me. (Spoilery drabble under the cut. Probably OOC tbh.)
They're in a darkspawn infested spot. The objective was to get something. They got it, but now they're retreating back to the eluvian because there are far too many blighted things for them to feasibly fight against—it has infested the place, and Davrin being the only one resistant to it does not accommodate the very real threat of the others possibly being tainted.
So Solas, as one with the most experience of command, calls for a retreat. The rest of the Veilguard have stumbled either through or to the eluvian, watching anxiously as the rest forfeit their hard-won ground to safely draw back to his position as he covers for them.
Rook does not agree.
"It is suicide to stay here!" Solas shouts at her from across the battlefield, his spells as percussive and punctuated as if the Fade was popping through the Veil at his summons. It makes her hair stand on end, raises frissons under her clothes, and the pressure in her ears reminds her of the air tensing before a lightning strike. "We must go!"
"We've almost got them pushed back!" she retorts, all the way on the other side. The steppe is the highest point in the mountainside, and she has been blasting off the darkspawn with shockwaves of arcane energy thus far. "We could recover other things from the ruins!"
"It is not worth it if lives are lost in the process!" Solas snarls, and Rook glances over her shoulder at him with arched brows.
In the middle of the fray, overwhelmed by the surge of darkspawn scuttling over the cliff face like swarming insects, Emmrich stumbles and falls with a yelp.
Rook struggles to concentrate between two points of focus. She is in the middle of her own combat, but her first instinct is to run to the necromancer's side. He's still casting, keeping the infected off of him, but they give no room for him to get back to his feet.
Solas moves, so quickly that Rook did not catch it. Magic surges, tingles on the back of her tongue, and in a flash the Dread Wolf falls into a sprint across the ground glistening with ichor and smattered with decaying flesh and rotting guts.
Rook blasts through the wave clambering to drag her down and watches, slack-jawed, as the great black wolf lunges over Emmrich with a snarl, standing squarely over him with enough room to spare the tall human to right himself and flee to the eluvian unharmed.
Fen'Harel's mighty jaws snap around darkspawn left and right, shaking them to shatter their bones and flinging the battered corpses like rag dolls. Soon enough his teeth are stained with inky, corrupted blood, bits of viscera wedged between his frothing gums, and his six lyrium-blue eyes meet Rook's, resolute and unflinching.
In that moment, Rook knows he will leave her there to save the rest.
A hurlock grabs her ankle. It is half disintegrated by her magic, yet it's still going, still gurgling, still strong enough to yank her foot out from under her. She lands roughly on her back and the air rushes out of her lungs in a pained whoosh, stunning her. Her vision blurs and swims. The steady drain of her mana had already weakened her, in addition to her wounds, but she had bashed her head on the ground, too.
The hurlock intends to bring her down the cliffside with it, she knows. She grits her teeth against the pain and vertigo and bashes the heel of her boot against its face, sending it careening off the edge. Her heart leaps when she rolls over to scramble back up onto her hands and knees and realizes—too late—how close it had dragged her.
Her legs drop out into open air. Her belly scrapes against the slickened stone. Her fingertips dig into the gravel, a biting anchor sure to leave her own blood behind. Her nails might not survive the weight of her entire body hanging on the precipice of a fathomless drop. When she peers down past her shoulder, eyes rounding, and there is nothing but mist and insurmountable depth.
She barely hears her cry of alarm over the sound of her own heart pounding in her ears. She does not recognize her own voice. She certainly does not anticipate calling out to the bane of her existence as a means to preserve it. "Solas!"
The wind is deafening, rushing past her as though it, too, flees the darkspawn she could sense clawing their way up the mountainside by the dread building in the base of her throat. The wolf had turned to deal with another cluster of darkspawn, but his ears angled towards her before his great head whipped around to spot her where she fell.
Her grip slips. She skids further down in a heart-lurching, precious, hands-breadth of distance. Her shoulders ache with the strain. Her chin drags the edge of the jagged stone. She cannot get a foothold with how the rock curves away from the ledge. She thinks she hears someone hollering her name, somewhere behind the wolf. One of her companions, or multiple—she isn't sure. She can see nothing save the glow of his eyes and the whites rimming them as he stares at her.
"Harellan!" she screams. The insult turned barb turned nickname seems the least fitting thing to use to entreat the man whom she had treated with such utter disdain and irreverence for the first portion of their acquaintance. But it is who he proved himself to be: a rebel with a cause. A man who stops at nothing to do what he feels is right.
One who does not flinch at the idea of sacrifice in favor of victory.
Rook's grip fails her. She scrabbles for purchase to no avail. The stone arches away from her, it seems, and she falls.
She does not see how deep the gouges the Dread Wolf's claws score into the stone when he launches into a sprint aided by his magic, frost fringing the ends of his pelt. She does not see the full stride of his legs stretching and hauling the ground closer to project himself into a lightning-quick gallop across the steppe. She does not see him nearly careen clean off the side of the mountain, barely skidding to a halt in time—back feet digging into the skittering gravel—as his upper half lunges over the edge. She does not see the massive maw of teeth engulf her because she has already squeezed her eyes shut in hopes that she won't know when the ground reaches her.
But the ear-ringing snap of his jowls jolts her out of her shock. If she had died, she could expect it to be dark. Maybe even warm. But wet?
Rook gasps as she's clamped tight in the mouth of the great black wolf. Her orientation becomes muddled, then—she has no concept of what direction is up, where he's going, or even what's going on around them. Any sounds are muffled. She thinks she hears the roar of a beast too big for them to handle in their current state of exhaustion. Her heart hammers against the inside of her ribs, and the rumble that surrounds her sets her nerves alight with prey instinct.
Fen'Harel runs. He leaps. He lands, and it is a jarring, uncoordinated crash into the ground—hopefully across the relatively safe bounds of the eluvian.
"Solas! Where's Rook?"
"Did you catch her? Is she—"
"Did you eat her?"
To answer the clamor of questions ringing in her ears, the wolf's mouth opens. She slides out and collapses on the ground in a gruesome heap of bodily fluids and remains.
"Remind me never to ask you for help again," she croaks. She reaches up and swipes the saliva off her eyelids so she can glare up at the Dread Wolf staring down at her in turn, every last eye trained solely on her. She thinks he is assessing her for damage.
His fur shimmers and she watches, disoriented, as the man reemerges from the shape of the wolf. His armor is battered and his shoulders sag from what is likely too prolonged of a mana drain, but he seems no worse for wear. She is momentarily distracted from him as her companions cluster around her and pull her into a seated position, their hands as busy as their mouths as they fret and curse and express their relief all at once in a raucous cacophony.
Her eyes snap back over to Solas struts promptly over to a hedge, yanks off one of his gauntlets, and proceeds to press a couple fingertips into his mouth and—presumably—onto the back of his tongue. He then wretches into the unsuspecting foliage.
The others fall abruptly silent, stricken and perplexed.
"I feel like I should take this as an insult," Rook remarks, scowling. "Surely I don't taste that bad."
Solas' eyes are red-rimmed and watery when he straightens, and if it weren't for that he would look as composed and dignified as ever. He snatches a potion from his belt and gargles it thoroughly, swishes it around his mouth, then spits it out. He swipes the back of his hand against his lips and scowls at her. "Forgive me if I would rather not be tainted by those blasted creatures!" he snaps, thoroughly rankled.
She knows it's not simply from how terrible darkspawn must taste.
She is proven correct when he stalks back over and kneels before her, the tension in his frame wound so tight she wonders how close he is to snapping his own spine. "Disrobe."
The others part like water at his demanding tone with varying levels of skepticism and disquiet, brooking no argument. But Rook is nothing if not contrary—she opens her mouth to protest, but Solas only lets out a terse, angry sound and reaches for the buckles on her armor.
"Stop!" she growls, slapping his hand away. She swears she sees the vein in his temple throb as he rears back as though she offended him. "What are you talking about?"
"Your clothes have been contaminated," he explains harshly. "The taint binds to organic materials. Being as that you were thoroughly inundated in blighted essence since you were too stubborn to fall back when I said to and relied upon an unfavorable means of rescue, we cannot risk you becoming infected!" He gestures to her clothes. "We will have to burn them. That goes for the rest, as well. I am certain Davrin already knows this."
"It's not exactly something you can wash out," the warden agrees.
"Oh, you have got to be joking!" Rook scoffs. "This is not the first time we've faced off against those bastards! What makes it so different this go around?"
"Your wounds, Fenalan!" Solas snarls. The intensity of his conviction as well as the rattled, unsettled tinge straining his voice makes her clamp her jaw shut. "If any ichor enters your bloodstream, you are doomed! You already tread upon death's door in your obstinance, but now you risk falling victim to something far worse!"
She frowns at him. She has a few scratches here and there, nothing so severe as to warrant such a reaction. She had been battered far worse before, endured wounds much more likely to do her in than hese. Something else had caused Solas to go overboard.
Her mind recalls the memory she had walked here in the Crossroads. The agent in Ghilan'nain's laboratory. The set of Solas' jaw when he had accepted the inevitability of his duty. He could not save her. There was no cure. He had no other option save to put her out of her misery before she truly suffered with the invented abomination.
The same fraught, wild glint in the eyes of his younger image peer directly into her own now. He is angry, yes, undeniably. But he is afraid, too. He does not want to make a sacrifice this day, she thinks.
Her hands shake as she begins to work the buckles loose. The others seem to take that as a sign to follow suit, removing the pieces of their armor that could be salvaged while piling the rest away from the vegetation encroaching upon the old paths winding around the network of mirrors. The metals could be decontaminated. The fabrics crackle and stink when Solas lights them with a curt snap of his hands. They are reduced to ash in seconds from the intensity of his ire, and he contorts the fabric of the Veil to crush that into powder that drifts, inert and harmless, off the ledge of the island in the wind.
The others group loosely together and head toward the Caretaker's dock when Rook tips her head towards it, helping each other along if they were weak or disoriented. No one had suffered grave injuries, thankfully, upon careful inspection. Most of the ichor had stained the outermost layers, so not all of it had to be destroyed, fortunately.
It was tough business, dealing with a mutated double blight.
Rook hung back a moment, waiting for Solas to turn away from the singed, blackened space below his feet. He is still drawn as tense as a bowstring, and does not move until she steps close enough to touch his arm. He pivots away from her hand and his gaze is cold on her.
"Ir abelas," she says. "I did not mean to worry you."
If Solas is taken aback by her admission, he does not convey it. But his shoulders loosen, just slightly. "That mistake almost cost your life, Rook," he says grimly.
"I know. I will endeavor to keep my head next time." She gestures towards the others, their low conversations carried by the breeze despite their distance. "Let's go wash all this shit off, yes?"
Solas looses a heavy exhale. They began to walk together.
"'Ma serannas," she tells him. "I did not think you would save me."
His stride falters briefly, then slows to accommodate her attention. The furrow between his brows eases into incredulity. "Why?"
Perhaps she expected him to confirm that it had not been his intention, that he had only done so because she was somewhat necessary to their mission's success, in the end. That he seems shocked she would even ask unroots her perception of him slightly.
"I rejected your orders," she says simply. "I got carried away. You had every right to leave me behind, but you didn't."
"I did not." Solas studied her for a moment, pensive. "I would not allow you to perish if I have a say in it, Fenalan," he offers after a moment. It is careful. It is measured. Yet she still notices the lack of bite to the words he normally wields when speaking to her. She had cultivated that response, she supposes, with how often she had exchanged verbal jabs with him in the beginning.
"Even if I don't understand your motivations," Rook sighs, "I thank you nevertheless." She swallows. "Ir abelas."
"Tel'abelas, ean'din. I am pleased to see you still live."
"Despite the perpetual headache I pose?"
"Despite that." Solas shakes his head. "I...do not think poorly of you. I would not see you fall into danger unnecessarily. That you can be so reckless and negligent of your own well-being at times is...disconcerting."
Rook cast him a side-eye. "Pot meet kettle. You stop throwing yourself on the line for the rest of us and I'll do the same."
The god of lies, treachery, and rebellion huffed what could have been a laugh. And Rook wonders if Varric would have any light to shed upon why the Dread Wolf was so protective of his unwitting pack, if he would ever admit to such a concept.