Tsuvlan: Why were you at the conclave, Kaaras?Kaaras: I was hired to go.Tsuvlan: Oh? A bodyguard, then. For a noble attending?Kaaras: Well... no. There was a girl there--about nineteen, I guess? Her parents were farmers.Tsuvlan: Nineteen? That’s... young.Kaaras: ... Yeah. Yeah it is.Tsuvlan: The girl you were hired to protect - her parents were farmers, you said? There must be a story there.Kaaras: Well, my mercenary group was passing through some farmland east of Kirkwall, and this couple was begging everyone with a sword to help them.Tsuvlan: The girl wasn’t there?Kaaras: No, I was supposed to--to bring her home.Tsuvlan: Was it a lot of money?Kaaras: (awkward laugh) No. No it wasn’t.
(in Val Royeaux)
Tsuvlan: How could you possibly have eaten all those pastries?Kaaras: Um. I’m - I have - what pastries?Tvuslan: I saw you with three boxes of those little cakes not an hour ago!Kaaras: You did? Three? Oh. um...(if in the party)Varric: How do you know they’re not hiding all of it in their sixteen shirts?Kaaras: Seven.Varric: That’s... not better.(ends with)Tsuvlan: I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything... you look so flustered.Kaaras: Flustered? Me? I - um...Tsuvlan: (sigh)
(later, also in Val Royeaux)
Tsuvlan: ... Did you see that?Kaaras: See what? I saw nothing.Tsuvlan: Where did that child get that box of cakes? It looks like it cost more than his... clothes.Kaaras: Wow. That is a mystery we will definitely never solve, not ever.Tsuvlan: He’s not even wearing shoes!(if in the party)Varric: Always knew you were a softie, Layers.
Finally getting cracking on my art trades! This one is of @adenicy‘s Tsuvlan Lavellan taking a rare moment for herself with a botany book Josie ordered for her from a university in Orlais. Tsuvlan likes plants. :)
I also took the art trade as an opportunity to do another color palette challenge and found one I thought would work nicely with Tsuvlan’s look.
For @adenicy, my half of an art/fic trade featuring her Tsuvlan Lavellan.
Solas has been searching for Tsuvlan all evening—so certain that she has yet to retire that he checks all her usual haunts... and then her less usual ones. Though Sera laughs at the furrow of his brow, only Vivienne guesses its true source.
“She retired hours ago, my dear,” she tells him, when the moon is high in the sky and most of the staff and visiting nobility have long since slipped off to bed. “I think she said she needed rest. It’s a long journey to the Winter Palace, after all. No need to fret.”
The reassurances have a mixed effect—yes, he is pleased to know that she hasn’t simply vanished (unklikely) or been waylaid too long by some last minute meeting or other (highly likely), but she is not one to sit idly at all, let alone on the eve of such an important departure. Perhaps she is more nervous about their impending visit to Halamshiral than she has let on—or perhaps Josephine’s more serious warnings about the Game have finally sunk in, after months of repetition.
He expects a nervous wreck as he climbs the stairs. Expects...
Before they launched the assault on Adamant, he found her among the mounts. The stables of Gryphon Wing Keep were hardly big enough to house all the mounts of the Inquisition, and though the heat of the desert had prevented them from utilizing the bulk of their horses in their activities there, the animals were necessary for the assault itself. The plan was to leave at sunset, to keep the mounts cool and the taxes on their water reserves low—the battle itself would be fought at midnight, or in the early hours of the morning.
Solas found his palms itching—waiting for the sun to make its descent, waiting for scouts to return, checking and re-checking his equipment, waiting for the order to pack up and begin the march...
A single day is such a short time, in the overall scheme of his life.
This one was utterly unbearable.
So he wandered the Keep, climbed to the tallest lookout tower to scowl in the direction of Adamant. Trying, and failing, to spot the fortress behind the wall of heat rising from the desert, obscuring the horizon. Then, failing in that, slipped down to its lowest depths, to cool his skin and his thoughts away from the blinding sun.
He found a tome so old its pages nearly crumbled to dust as he turned them. It only served to reinforce his mistakes in his mind.
But then again, he thought—and it brought a bitter smile to his lips—this world has only offered one thing to distract him from the realities of what he wrought, in ignorance.
So he sought her out, with the sun slipping past noon at an agonizing pace. And find her he did, under a makeshift stable of canvas slung from rubble. Sleeves rolled up to her elbows, a thick brush in her hand, working circles into her hart’s flank. The other making reassuring smoothing motions, as the hart drank from a trough of water.
As Solas ducked under the flap of canvas, Blackwall reached over to pluck the brush from her hand.
“I think,” he said, when she opened her mouth to protest, “the beast won’t have any hair left if you keep that up. You’ve been at it since morning.”
Sera, perched on a wooden barrel nearby, grinned at Tsuvlan’s embarrassed smile. “Don’t worry, he’ll be the prettiest thing in the whole desert. For like, five minutes, cuz’ then he’ll be full of sand.”
“Solas,” Blackwall called, noticing him as he deposited the brush with the other grooming supplies. “Come to distract our fearless leader?”
“I don’t need distracting,” she grumbled—making a face at Sera, who was making a lewd gesture that Solas didn’t quite catch. Not that he needed to—he suspected it would not take much effort to guess, were he particularly inclined.
But she turned, and there was something about her tight smile that spoke of exhaustion, the shadows under her eyes carrying a worry that Solas had felt in his chest for days, at that point.
“I found some old tomes in the basement,” he said. Slipping his hands behind his back, so she would not glance down and see how unsettled he was. “I was hoping you might help me peruse them, to see if there is any worthwhile knowledge within.”
Sera giggled, followed by a snort. “Hear that? He wants you to peruse his tomes.”
Tsuvlan tried to give Sera some sort of chastising look, but was far too fond at the edges to have any real effect.
“Well.” She makes some attempt to dust the pale hart hair off her clothing, a lopsided smile making her expression soft, dreamy, instead of tense and worried. “That does sound... productive.”
He can’t help a fond smile as he reaches the top of the stairs—remembering soft conversation, secreted away in the depths of the old fortress. Fleeting touches as her fingers brushed the back of his hand, pretending to reach for some text or other. The softness of her lips against the curve of his jaw.
His thoughts are interrupted as he opens the door to an off-key humming, and the soft, rhythmic scuffing of bare feet on stone floor.
And he finds his smile returns, when he reaches the top of the stairs. Finds he cannot help but linger there, and watch—as Tsuvlan dances, gliding along through her room with some imaginary partner, eyes half-lidded in concentration.
She is leading, in this dance—and his heart flutters as he watches how precise her every movement is, how delicately her touch would guide a real partner. He declared her graceful long ago, only having seen the sure draw of her bowstring, or the steps she would take to slip out of danger. Different steps, now, different poise—but he finds himself unsurprised, that she takes as naturally to this as she does battle.
Eventually he spots him, as he makes no effort to hide himself. Clearly not expecting company—she offers a sheepish smile in return for his steady, warm gaze, her hands dropping from the waist of her imagined partner as an afterthought.
“I believe Josephine declared you an excellent dancer,” Solas says—equally as loathe to break the comfortable silence between them as he is eager to gently tease her, in retaliation for all that searching.
Her answering laugh carries a surprising amount of embarrassment to it. “I’ve found you can never practice too much.”
He hums in agreement—content to lean against the railing, to take in the sight of her—firelight in her hair, stars at her back, eyes bright and full of a warmth so contagious he feels it spreading to his own.
“Although,” she says, her smile slipping into something coy. “I don’t think I’ve had nearly as much practise following as I have leading.”
She bites her lip, after speaking, and lets her offer hang in the air between them unspoken. So he might pretend he has not understood, should he wish to.
She cannot know, now, that in a few years’ time she will not dance to ease her worries. That she will not be able to take a brush to her hart, or a knife to her fletching, for the pain that will grow in her whole body as the anchor, finally, rejects its unwilling host. That he will not be there, to offer a soothing word, to whisk her away to quiet places, distract her with fleeting touches and unspoken promises.
And he does not know that she will hear the truth of it all—that she will not reject him, will not take his heart and dash it to the ground. As he is so certain that she will, in his darkest moments, when he cannot imagine that she will whisper that she loves him still—that she will not let him become the monster her people tell tales about.
And perhaps there are wiser choices for him to make in this moment—kinder, certainly, to both of them.
But he has been saying that all this time, and still he finds himself choosing the few steps that takes him to her. Choosing the softness of her hand in his, the belonging that is his hand on her hip. The trust that she offers when he leads, and she follows.
And he thinks that she is beautiful, with the moonlight tracing the line of her jaw, chasing away the shadows of leadership under her eyes. So beautiful that he cannot think of anything else—cannot feel anything but the warmth of her skin on his, her breath on his lips as their dance draws them ever closer, the beating of their hearts the only symphony to guide their steps.
So he tells her, in a low voice, his words hushed as he murmurs them against her skin. And she laughs, pressing her head to his shoulder, so he will not see her embarrassment as he tries to describe how perfect she is.
And there is—nothing else. Not the Game, waiting for them in Orlais. Not his cause, to which he will inevitably retreat. Not the threat of an ancient Magister, trying to curl his hand around the world and make it his own.
In this moment, there is nothing but her, nothing in the whole world aside from them together.
