#the tempest inside

[withthebreezesblown]

Guess which heifer finally got around to downloading those awesome, amazing Alistair character swap mods for DA:I and made the most passable version of her Warden she’s managed yet in Inquisition.

Briefly had trouble deciding between the Cullen and Blackwall replacers and then realized, why have only one when I could have them both? Pretty sure my brain has now, in one day, exceeded it’s usual maximum dopamine production for the entire week. I mean, look at them.

[trulycertain]

keep your heart close to the ground

This is a remix of @withthebreezesblown‘s gorgeous Too Dark To Read, which is a detailed, clever happy ending for King Alistair with plenty of bittersweetness and credit given for his intelligence, and most importantly, PUPPIES. Sadly, only one puppy appears in this fic, but only because Breezes has the rest covered. This isn’t a direct prequel or sequel, more some missing in-between scenes; some extra “our boy grows up and is actually pretty good at this kinging thing.” Hope I’ve done your beautiful fic justice, Breezes.

She’s only been a sister for two weeks, but she’s already seen the boy a few times, usually getting his ear clipped or once, skidding round the corner darting down a corridor, chased by a succession of different people who were all in robes and exceedingly angry. She hears troublemaker and bastard and occasionally little shit – in the words of Brother Brendan, after stubbing his toe halfway through a rant about the boy - and she makes a note to be wary.

She’s bringing bread into the kitchen when she sees a short figure with hair in all directions scrubbing pots and, very quietly, humming. She sees him tense, as if expecting another shouting-at, but the cook’s saying something and there’s no time to think, no time at all.

It’s only a couple of days later that she’s walking past one of the small supply rooms when she sees the copper glint of candlelight on hair. She stops, even with the laundry in her arms, and peers in as unobtrusively as she can.

The boy doesn’t even notice her. He’s sitting next to a simple wooden chessboard – one of the simple ones, from the library, not even worth stealing, but somehow she doesn’t think that’s what he’s doing. He’s silent, a far cry from the jittery little menace in their stories who talks with his hands and is the bane of the Revered Mother’s life, and he looks thoughtful, brown eyes shining slightly in the dim light. He’s turning the carved king piece in his hands, over and over, watching it.

No, not thoughtful, she realises, after a moment. He looks terribly sad.

 The boy is bright – far brighter than he pretends. Duncan recognises that, as someone who was similar, once. He’s quick on the uptake, and wry, though he hides it with… broadness. He grins and talks with his hands, lets sentences drag on and crash into each other until his audience is amused or exasperated. There is something of his father in him, it is true, but there’s something warmer there. The boy is older in the mind, perhaps even smarter, than his father was at this age – even as he laughs too loudly and stumbles to apologise for himself, scuffing his boots in the dirt when he’s made to speak of himself and his upbringing and changing the subject as quickly as possible.

It’s almost convincing, but then there are the moments when he thinks Duncan’s not looking. When he’s consulting maps and looking at the sky, clearly tracking their route by the stars. Polishing armour with a silent, honest discipline his father never had, his eyes far away, bringing to mind things Duncan has heard about templar meditation. 

When there’s fear in his eyes but he beheads his first hurlock matter-of-factly, almost easily. Only afterwards, when his sword is cleaned and sheathed, does he remember to make a nervous joke about “nearly screaming like a girl.” It might be true, but there’s steel in his eyes.

Duncan thinks that Maric and Eamon were fools.

Teagan wonders when Alistair became a sovereign – the coin, not just a ruler, though he might have laughed at the confusion once. He could have been carved in metal, embossed. His face is steady, impassive, as if he’s training or playing Wicked Grace rather than being crowned the ruler of Ferelden. It’s surprising to see; Teagan thought he hadn’t inherited it from his father.

He’ll say something about that later, but more delicately, not wanting to see the way Alistair shrinks slightly in his boots, the hint of a grimace at the mention of Maric, quickly hidden. And Alistair will laugh, and say, “My father? No, that one was the Chantry. You try staying steady when half your classmates are making faces behind Brother Bertrand’s back and you’ll get caned if you fall out of formation or… breathe. ‘An unmoved demeanour befitting a servant of Andraste who is above all but his duty,’” he’ll echo, in a pompous, false voice.

The laughter will fade when he holds court, that granite-faced quality returning, and the nobles don’t know what to make of him – only that he is their king, and they are terrified of making a wrong step in front of the pretender whose blood they were laughing about outside.

The farmers and the Alienage elves are treated differently, Teagan will notice, with smiles and nods, the boy casually listing in his chair as if it’s simply a social call and he’s about to ask for cake and scones to be brought through.

But for now, Alistair bows his head – due to tradition as much as the weight of the crown – and Teagan notices the hint of a smile on his face: small and surprised, but there.

Humans are stupid. It’s one of the first things her mother teaches her, when she doesn’t know much more than warm and food and ooh, biting is fun.

Humans never have any idea what’s good for them; if they find something decent they run away from it, and then you have to drag them back and maybe nudge them a little so they know. They guard the wrong things and they get scared to show their teeth, and then they wonder why they’ve been backed into a corner and they’re afraid. Someone has to snarl for them, sometimes, because they’re not allowed to, or they think they’re not allowed to and that’s almost worse. Because they’re fierce, under it all, and once they know what they should be fighting for, they’ll fight with all their hearts. Sometimes it just takes too long.

Like her mother said: stupid. Though she’ll only realise just how stupid in the years to come, long after she’s wriggled into warm arms and she’s heard surprised laughter and noises, startled but soothing: Hey there, we haven’t met, have – Ow! Wow. Ow.

Long after she grins and burrows closer because warm and smells interesting and kind - she knows it like her heartbeat and the smell of hay and the fact she needs to help these stupid humans – he calls her Arlessa, with the barking that comes from amusement rather than anger.

This one isn’t too bad. Licking’s nearly as fun as biting. She’ll keep him.

She only realises later that a whole country went We’ll keep him too. Bad luck for them. He’s hers.

“You know, they just can’t get my nose right.”

The elf edges closer, parchment still in her arms, thinking that this was not the way she’d expected to have an audience. “I… Your Majesty?”

The king turns abruptly. “Right, sorry, hello.” He smiles in a way that almost looks genuine, for a shem noble. “Corani Valethan?”

Corani nods. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Good to know they didn’t drag the wrong representative in here. That happened once with the Orlesians, it was embarrassing. Anyhow… I was just thinking.” The king gestures to the portrait on the wall, the thing he must have been looking at. “It always feels a bit… self-aggrandising putting pictures of me around this place. It’s not like they’re about to forget that by the way, still king. I almost wonder if I should have one for every mood, you know? Angry me. Happy me. Regal me? I’ve never been much good at regal. One already feels like too much.” He clears his throat. “I’m rambling. I apologise. I’ve just had some very good news. But your proposal for the former Alienage…” The king walks to a great oak desk, and waves a hand. “I’ve heard good things. A lot of them.”

After staring at that display, Corani realises that this is… actually happening. She tentatively moves forwards and lays the parchment she’s been holding down on the desk, unfolding it slowly, and she mumbles, “So have I.”

He sounds surprised. “You… have?”

“About… you, Your Majesty. They said I’d be granted an audience. They said you were, uh…” She clears her throat. “’One of the good ones.’”

He laughs at that, and that’s too honest for a shem and all. “I’m trying,” he says quietly. “Believe me.”

It's the strangest thing: she looks into his eyes, and she does.

[nanahuatli]

“But she has Carver and Muffin and Phoebe and all of her Wardens, and she is happy.”

That’s a lovely family you got there. Be a shame if something were to happen to one of them.

@withthebreezesblown

[withthebreezesblown]

I'd love to see either what the other apprentices thought of Solona and how she acted around the Tower, or more of the sword training lessons.

At seven, Neria is the youngest in the Circle. The youngest, but definitely not the biggest baby. That’s not Misha, who is eight and has been in the Circle for nearly a year and still cries all the time either. The biggest baby is Keili, age eleven, who tattles on everyone. She told the templars about the sweets Felton got from who-knows-where, and she told the templars about what Shan said about the templars being creepy, and she told them that she thought Neria was possessed because she laughs too much and it’s not right. It isn’t personal though, her being so sure that Keili is the biggest baby—it’s just that she understands. Trying to suck up to the templars—that’s something only a stupid baby would do. Because the templars are liars. They told her she’d be better off in the Circle. But they were wrong. Little Darvel from the Alienage she lived in before, he’d have been better off in the Circle than with his Mama who was always too busy trying to get another one of the green glass bottles to feed her boy or pay any attention to him at all. Her Mama paid plenty of attention. She braided her hair fancier than all the other mamas, and her stew was the best in the whole Alienage, and nothing about the Circle is better than being with her Mama, not even after the magic when everyone looked at her like she was a bear on the loose or a human with his sword out. That’s how she knows. The Circle isn’t about better. If it was they’d have taken Darvel, not her. It’s just about magic and fear.

So there are things a lot dumber and more babyish than crying.

And then everyone says they’re getting a new girl, that she won’t be the youngest anymore, and she’s not too sure how to feel. The older girls dote on her now, giving her a slice off their orange when they’re lucky enough to get them, and she always gets to be the princess when they play. Will the new girl get her orange slices now? Will they make Neria let her be the princess?

They bring her in at night, and her sobs intrude on the dormitory well before she does. In the dim light, her face is as red as her hair. When they put her on a bed, she curls in on herself, whimpering “Mama,” into the thin pillow. The other girls sigh. “A crier. Just bloody wonderful,” someone mutters.

It’s a bit unfair, she thinks, their resentment. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, crying like that. It’s so reasonable that she’s afraid if she starts herself, she’ll never stop. That’s why she never does. That and something else she doesn’t have the word for yet.

Eventually someone—probably Keili, she thinks, disgusted—snaps, “Yes, yes, we all get it, you want your mama. Well guess what? You’re a mage, and she doesn’t want you. Keep it down so the rest of us can get some sleep, would you?”

And that’s it. She’s mad, and not at the crying girl. Just because they’re old and don’t remember their mamas is no reason to act like there’s anything wrong with crying for your mama. She’s up out of her bed before she can think twice, fists balled up at her sides. “Leave her alone!”

She’s torn for a moment between hitting someone and comforting the crier, but then the girl makes the most pitiful sound, like she’s trying so hard to hush but all she’s managing is to choke on her tears.

Neria let’s her fists fall open and makes her way over to the shuddering figure bunched up at the head of the bed across from hers.

At first she just stands there, not sure what to do. And then she remembers what her Mama would do when she had the bad dreams before the magic came.

She sings. She reaches up to pat the girl’s head, because Mama did that too, and it made it better. After a moment the girl shuffles around so that instead of being curled away from her, she’s curled in towards her, and slowly the shaking subsides.

“There, there,” she says when she’s done singing, because that’s what Mama said. She pushes hair, wet with tears and clinging to the girl’s forehead and cheeks, away from her face. When she can see the girl’s watery eyes, she grins. “Hi, there. I’m Neria.”

There’s a moment of quiet before the girl whispers, so softly she hardly catches it, “Solona.”

“Don’t mind them, Solona. They’re just grumpy because they don’t have mamas worth missing. You can cry if you want to.”

“Do you cry?”

Neria think for a long moment before she finally says, “No. Because some people like it when you cry, and they’re mean, and I won’t do it just because. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad to cry. It’s bad to be mean.”

The girl—Solona—contemplates this. “…I don’t want to do what mean people want. I won’t cry either.”

“Laughing is better.”

Solona nods, very seriously, repeating quietly as though she’s memorizing something very important, “Laughing is better.”

Later, Neria will realize this was a lesson no needed to teach Solona Amell. At seven, she couldn’t have articulated it, but half of Neria’s laughs are born of spite. Once the tears are well and truly dried, Solona laughs because she can’t help herself. 

She laughs at Neria’s worst jokes and theatrics and at the way Mr. Wiggins rubs his face against her ankles. She laughs with delight at the sweet taste of the blackberries they get for Summerday and at Senior Enchanter Sweeney’s muttered improprieties.

It turns out not being the youngest isn’t so bad at all. Not only does Solona laugh at all her jokes, she doesn’t even want to be the princess—Neria has to drag her along to get her to play at all, insisting that she’s a princess too because she’s Neria’s little sister. When Shan says, “But you’re an elf—she can’t be your sister,” Neria isn’t sure what to think. Back in the Alienage, they called the humans shems, and that was a big deal, shems and elves, but that was there, and here she thought it was just templars and mages.

Solona stops trying to pull away from the hand Neria is dragging her along by then and straightens herself up to her not very impressive full height, hardly taller than Neria. “I want to play now. I want to be Neria’s sister. You can’t make me not be.”

Neria grins. It’s not shems and elves after that. It’s not even templars and mages, not for them. It’s just Neria and Solona and everyone else.

They call Solona Neria’s shadow, and once again Neria finds herself thinking how dumb they all are. Her shadows are her own. Solona? Solona is all light.

[withthebreezesblown]

Fair Trade

It’s a pity, Sweeney thinks, that Irving won’t let the girl go.

Normally he can’t be bothered to concern himself overmuch with the apprentices. And it’s certainly not that he’s fond of any of them. Best not to get too attached while they’re still unHarrowed. He’s seen too many not come out the other end of that, at least not as--well, that’s really about the same as not coming out at all in the end, isn’t it? So he does not care for the apprentices. But the ones who laugh at the things he mutters that he shouldn’t say out loud at all, instead of staring at him in abject horror and searching around for a lurking templar--well, it’s not fondness, he assures himself, but maybe there’s just a little soft spot for those few. Neria Surana, whose shameless cackle is sure to draw templars if there weren’t any around before. Anders, who occasionally forgets to make sure the mischief in his eyes is hiding all that rage underneath; who reminds him of himself, except he thinks sometimes that that boy still has a shot at letting his bitterness turn him into something other than a crotchety old senior enchanter who will never leave this hold. And little Solona Amell, who tries so hard to hide all her delighted giggling. If she catches it in time before it bursts out, she makes a noise like a little piglet. He’d forgotten he even knew what piglets sounded like, in some other life before armored men dragged him off of his family’s farm. Every time she makes that noise, he remembers just for a moment what he thought he’d forgotten entirely. What life outside the Circle was like.

Still, it’s not any attachment that makes him watch the Amell girl in her lessons with Irving more often than he should. Not that there’s much to see. The two spend half of every lesson enacting the same parody of education that is playing out now, as they have ever since the day he watched her magic snap back on her when self-doubt and uncertainty broke the lightning spell she’d been weaving, the day when he finally took it upon himself to tell little Solona Amell what Irving himself would not—that she was allowed to tell the First Enchanter, “No.” That she couldn’t stay between all things forever—she would have to say, “No,” to something eventually, whether it was Irving or the fear and shame that held her back.

Sweeney had known that day what her decision was, had seen it in her eyes.

She’s still quiet and attentive as she’s ever been, but when Irving tries to hand her a staff, she sits and folds her hands together in her lap. When, determined, he goes through all the motions and gestures as surely as though she actually were practicing along with him, explaining the theory as he moves and lightning flashes through the air or ice snaps across the floor, her hands clasp harder, fingers twining together so tightly the knuckles go white. Only when he puts down the staff, as he finally is now, and the lesson moves on to Creation magic do her hands release and her shoulders lower from where they’ve slowly risen up to near her ears. Her shoulders fall, but the tension between the two of them lingers.

Sweeney watches the girl practice a simple spell meant to mend flesh, and he can’t help thinking she’s paying more attention to Irving from the corner of her eye than the rubbery spindleweed frond, torn nearly in two and slowly knitting itself back together, that’s she is ostensibly focusing on.

She doesn’t have that natural affinity for Creation magic that she does for the Primal schools to begin with, and she really can’t afford the lack of focus and precision.

...The spell is sloppy.

Irving should let her go, he thinks again. Wynne would do better with the girl than he’s ever going to at this rate. Solona doesn’t have the gift for Creation that’s clear in the Primal magic that slips out from time to time, despite her best efforts, but that’s a gift many mages don’t have at all, in anything, and they manage well enough. If Irving would let her go, she could still make a passable healer, if not a gifted one. If he goes on refusing like this, the poor child will end up proficient at nothing at all.

When the lesson ends, Solona smiles at him as she passes, warm and genuine and grateful. He doesn’t like it. Fool child. The right to refuse Irving’s tutelage was always hers. He only let her know she could; he didn’t give it to her.

He manages not scowl at her smile. He does not manage to keep the surliness from his voice when he strides up to Irving and demands, “Why are you holding that poor little girl hostage? Let someone else mentor the little mouse before you ruin her altogether.”

Irving sighs. “I’m not holding her hostage, Sweeney.” He uses that particular tone of his that Sweeney hates most… tired patience.

“If you let someone else mentor her, she’d learn ten times as much as she ever will from you. And yet you won’t let her go.”

“She’s wasting her time with Creation magic.”

He didn’t exactly start this confrontation on an even keel, but Sweeney feels his temper rising, and that look on Irving’s face does nothing but fan the flames. It’s something like pride, and it rubs Sweeney entirely wrong. It reminds him of the way he’s seen the way the man look at his apprentice when she isn’t paying attention—pride, and every bit of the patience he’s famed for, despite his impatience with her refusal to practice Primal magic, and if Sweeney didn’t know how the man is using the girl, there’s something he’d even call affection. But how can it ever be that when he subjects the girl to this daily, and for what? “She isn’t a piece of clay, Irving! She’s a living being with her own will—quite a bit more of it, I dare say, than she likes to let on, and no matter what potential she has, it’s hers to use—or not use—as she will, not yours! Don’t think I don’t understand why you’re pushing so hard! A mage with that kind of power of destruction is quite the bargaining chip. I don’t know exactly who you’re so keen to sell her off to or what you think you’ll get in return—”

“That’s enough.” Irving’s voice is cold as the ice he spent an hour trying to wrest from his pupil.

Sweeney forgets, sometimes, just what it was that got the man elected as First Enchanter. They’ve known each other since Sweeney was fourteen and Irving was nine. He forgets what he’s only rarely seen and understood at all: just how intimidating Irving can be.

It’s only later, years later, that he understands. His vision isn’t good anymore, but that hair, red as blood, is hard to miss. As he watches it disappear beyond the same doors they all arrive through but so few ever exit, Sweeney finally understands both what Irving wanted all along and what he was willing to pay for it. What Irving had seen in that girl’s grasp was nothing the First Enchanter had ever planned to use for himself. And the price he’d paid for it was the resentment of him that grew in her year by year as he forced on her lessons she did not want but which were the only currency that would ever buy her the thing that Irving was so stubbornly sure was within her reach. Finally, Sweeney thinks, little Solona Amell is free.

[withthebreezesblown]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

*cackles like a fucking lunatic in the faces of the executive dysfunction, shitty plotting skill, and crippling self-doubt that made this chapter such a bitch to get out*

Also special thanks to Lamp for allowing me to cry on you and helping me brain when I had no brain, and Tru for fixing my shit and making me feel like what I had scraped together might possibly be anything other than trite, ill-contrived, and fucking horrible. ily

[withthebreezesblown]

It’s time for my annual DA:O replay, which is to say I’m back on my Origins bullshit. I just... love Solona and Alistair so much. And everyone else. But especially them. This is possibly my all time favorite screencap I’ve ever taken of the two of them:

Solona, substituting a generic arm crossing animation for, you, know, an actual facial expression, but looking so cute doing it anyway:

[withthebreezesblown]

So I decided to replay Origins again, but always playing it the exact same way was just a smidge old.

...So I changed Solona’s hair, tweaked her eye texture, and used a retexture of the Grey Warden armor, and now I will contentedly play her exactly the same way and make all the same choices.

Ah, everything feels so fresh and exciting now.