Chapter Text
As it turns out, the hallowed Inquisitor Trevelyan is an absolute lightweight.
Rook realizes this after her friend has finished only her second glass of wine, the point at which Evelyn's cheeks become tinged a permanent pink and she laughs at everything coming out of Dorian's mouth preemptively, before he even finishes his sentences. It's nice to see someone usually so serious and tightly wound unfurl, for however short a time. Rook finds she even harbors a twinge of jealousy towards her for it, but she squashes it with the gratefulness she feels at having visitors to the Lighthouse. It feels like it’s been a long time.
She’s pleased just to bask in the warmth of watching the two old friends reminisce about bygone days, telling her stories of people she’s never met and their adventures with them. Though some of them, of course, she does know.
"Now, my dear, please do tell me you've had enough to drink to indulge my asking about having Solas, of all people, worming around in your head." It takes Rook a beat too long to realize Dorian is addressing her, now waiting expectantly for a reply. Evelyn hiccups, and reaches out to pour herself another glass from the waning bottle sitting in the middle of them.
Rook realizes she might need to catch up to the Inquisitor on tipsiness if she’s going to be talking about Solas. "Oh, it was just delightful. When he wasn't making me hallucinate my dead mentor, he was unendingly condescending and judgemental about my every thought and action. Just your garden variety, manipulative ancient blood magic bond." She takes a long drink from her wine glass, gulps it down, and tips the rest of her glass upwards again to finish off its contents before she continues. “The low point was probably him leaving me to die in Fade jail. The high point was…actually, I’m not sure there were any high points.”
Even as the words leave her mouth, her memory draws her to the moment she first heard Solas’s voice in her head outside her dreams, when he appeared to help her save the Dalish clan from Elgar’nan’s foul ritual. Perhaps it wasn’t a high point per se, but she cannot deny to herself the relief that had crashed through her in that instant. Though, that doesn’t mean she has to admit it to anyone.
Thinking about it brings everything back in a rushing wave that she isn't prepared for. Nearly a year has passed since she last saw Solas. It's not that she intentionally puts him out of her mind, but the sting of remembering his manipulation of her vulnerability is enough psychological deterrent to prevent her mind from drifting there on the average day. And now, here she is; drifting. Hurtling, more like, thanks to the alcohol.
That's how you do it, right? You get people so eager for those scraps of approval that they never see the knife coming. She tries very hard (and fails) not to think about the way his voice sounded when said her name in response to those words.
Rook—
"Strangely, that sounds both nothing and exactly like the Solas I knew." Dorian replies after a long moment.
"Personally, I think the high point was you convincing Solas not to tear down the Veil and commit genocide again, but I could be biased, since I was there for that part." Evelyn interjects, with only minor slurring of her words.
Rook’s brow furrows. "Me? That wasn't me. That was you, or Morrigan. Or Mythal within Morrigan...or whatever version of her it was that came forward." Mourn Watch upbringing be damned, Rook still has a difficult time understanding the interplay between the fragment of Mythal that existed within the witch of the wilds and the one she took from the Crossroads after convincing her she was worthy of her help.
"None of us would have been there without you, Rook. After everything he did to you, you still tried to help him. I admire you greatly for it." Evelyn tips her glass in Rook's direction, and she feels her own face begin to flush.
"Thank you, Inquisitor." she murmurs, "That means a great deal to me, though I can't credit my own," she almost says the word benevolence, before she stops herself, disgusted at the word, "willingness to forgive. I just...tried to do what I thought Varric would have wanted." Saying his name casts something into the room, a draft of cold absence that blows through all three of them for a somber minute.
Dorian slaps his knees abruptly. “We’re going to need more alcohol, I can feel it in the air.” He then ensures this by chugging the rest of the wine straight from the bottle they’d been sharing on his way to the pantry where Lucanis used to sleep.
Rook watches his slightly out of step gait with a smile before turning her attention back to Evelyn, who is clutching her empty glass and boring a hole into the wall behind Rook’s head with a distant expression. “Are you alright?” Rook inquires, already missing the sound of Evelyn’s tipsy giggles.
The mighty Inquisitor hiccups again. “Yes, I’m alright. Just thinking. Did Varric ever tell you about what happened at Adamant fortress?”
“The nightmare demon, when Hawke stayed behind in the Fade?” Evelyn nods. “It wasn’t his favorite story, no. Most of what I learned about it came from the book.” The very aptly named All This Shit is Weird.
Evelyn clears her throat, looking away again as she speaks like she’s gazing into her own memories. “I certainly can understand why. I was just thinking of something we saw there. The nightmare demon was so powerful, one of the most oppressive demons I’ve ever encountered. When we were trying to escape it, we came across this little graveyard with all our names written on them, and…” she sighs heavily, like she’s suppressing a shudder, “I think they were our fears, our deepest fears written on them.”
“What was yours?” Rook asks before she can stop herself.
The Inquisitor smiles wryly. “Confinement. Classic Circle mage complex, I know.”
“Southern circle mage complex, my darling.” Dorian corrects over his shoulder, still rifling through the alcohol selection.
Evelyn rolls her eyes at the correction. “Yes, barbarians, the lot of us.” She calls back, before leaning over the table between herself and Rook, lowering her voice and dipping her head in Rook’s direction to say, “Dorian’s was temptation. Varric’s was becoming his parents. And Solas…his was dying alone.”
It’s not what Rook expected. She would have guessed something like losing control, or failure—and she would have been wrong.
In her mind’s eye, she pictures him in the Fade prison across the great gulf that divided them, the way his jaw would tighten when he first recognized her presence and the way his eyes lingered on her before she flickered out of the meditation. If she had ever wondered if he had begun to enjoy the company of her visits, those half formed questions had been obliterated by the sting of his later betrayal.
Still, she remembers the first time she explored the very room in which they sit now, before she and her team settled in and made a strange, Fade-tinged home out of the Lighthouse. The single place setting at the head of a long, empty table, and how the sight of it had induced pity in her, like a flash in the pan she doused by reminding herself of who he was and what he had done.
On some level, she had always thought of Solas as a profoundly lonely person. She just never imagined that it bothered him so much.
Unbidden, a flash of his face the last time she saw him flickers across her mind’s eye; the trepidatious way he looked at her when she handed him back his dagger and told him atonement wasn’t about what you want. The way he clutched himself when he doubled over and sobbed, Evelyn kneeling at his side to remind him he was free, now, to choose his own path forward. The tear stained nod he gave her when he relinquished his lyrium dagger for the final time. How his fingers brushed over her knuckles just seconds longer than necessary. Something in her gut twists.
She’s torn from her reverie by the sound of muffled sniffles from across the table. “Inquisitor?” Are you crying for the Dreadwolf? Fuck, was I about to cry for him?
Evelyn dabs at her eyes with the ends of her sleeves. “I’m sorry. I know it must seem ridiculous to you, given everything you went through with him. But he was a dear friend once, if you can believe it.” The Inquisitor sucks in a breath, tears falling from her eyes. “I really believe he is good at heart, and thinking of him out there alone, forever, is just-”
“Dammit, I told you starting with red wine was a mistake. You always cry when you drink red wine!” Dorian rejoins the table with a bottle of what Rook can smell, even at such a distance, is straight liquor. Oh, good. He thrusts the bottle at Evelyn. “Drink this, and take heart. Our old friend probably has the company of his beloved spirits. He came from the Fade himself. He’s probably glad to be back.”
Evelyn sniffles and takes a long drink of whatever Dorian found in the pantry. “I hope you’re right. I hope he isn’t just stewing in his regret instead of trying to face it, you know? Do you think he’ll ever be able to get out of that prison, to reach the rest of the Fade?”
“He said he was going to look for a way to calm the anger of the Blight, yes? At least he has goals. And foolish old friends who worry for him, in spite of his egregious betrayals.” Does she count among them, Rook wonders? Would she want to? ‘Friend’ seems both too familiar and too understated to describe the nature of their relationship. This is why I don’t think about this shit.
But she’s still thinking about it, hours later, laying in her bed after Dorian helps a very drunk Evelyn find a room to crash in before finding one for himself. She stares at the ceiling above her head without really seeing it, the alcohol dulling her ability to stem the tide of memory and rumination. It’s hard to stop thinking about how differently Fen’Harel’s friends from the Inquisition must have seen him, knowing him first as Solas, then later as the ancient elven deity from Dalish nightmare. Talking to Evelyn and Dorian about it is the closest she’s ever been to understanding why Varric thought he might be capable of talking sense into him at the ritual site, before everything went to shit. It’s the last thing on her mind before her body drifts into sleep.
Her mind, though, does not sleep.
She comes to in a place that, as a mage, she knows to be the Fade, but her familiarity with it ends there. Her feet are bare, pressed into warm sand, and a soft salty breeze hits her face as it rolls off the ocean in front of her. The sun is setting distantly over azure water, the distant cries of birds just barely reaching her ears.
She looks around, trying to ground herself. The beach reminds her of Rivain, but isn’t any part of it she remembers visiting in the course of her travels. To her right, she notices a single pier with a small boat affixed to it. When she turns her head to the left, she notices a modest shack with a crackling fire in front of it, framed by racks with hanging fish dangling above the flames.
“Rook?”
She spins on her heel so fast she almost stumbles over, forgetting she’s balancing on sand instead of solid ground. Her heart is pounding in her head as she takes in the unfamiliar, yet sickeningly familiar person standing a few paces from her. Fuck, am I still drunk? Or is that really—”Solas.”
For an indeterminate amount of time, they simply stand there, staring at each other. He has shed the armor she always knew him to wear, clad instead in a long green tunic rolled up to the tops of his elbows and simple brown trousers folded halfway up his calves. Under one arm, he clutches a bundle of small logs and twigs, no doubt the kindling he intends to use for the fire she saw.
And what does he see when he looks at her? She glances down at herself, scowling slightly at the realization she’s still wearing the oversized, many-holed sleep shirt she favors wearing to bed and the loose linen shorts that match it. She clears her throat.”I didn’t mean to—I mean, I wasn’t trying to come here. Where is here, by the way? Is this the prison?”
He offers a small smile. “Yes and no. Occasionally I conjure up places that offer more…amenable surroundings for reflection. Not all of us are so quick to face and put to rest what we regret. I find myself in need of a reprieve, from time to time.”
“I didn’t take you for a beach guy.” Rook blurts out, before she has time to think better of it.
Solas laughs in reply, a deep, hearty laugh. One she’s never heard from him before, a more free sound than she thought him capable of making. “Would you like to sit?” He asks, gesturing to the long log burrowed in the sand beside the fire with his free hand.
I should leave. I should wake up. I shouldn’t be here.
“....okay.” She answers lamely. And so they sit, almost on either end of the log,such is the space they leave between them. There is rustling as Solas deposits his kindling beside the log, and then a long expanse of quiet once more. As the fire pops and crackles in the silence between them, she almost questions if this isn’t just some strange dream she’s conjured from her own subconscious; but she has a deep sense of knowing that it is not, for this is no version of Solas she could even imagine before now.
She keeps her gaze fixed on the dancing flames, but cannot keep her peripheral vision from noticing how he watches her curiously. Eventually, she can’t stop herself from turning her face to look back. There must be a question in her eyes—what are you looking at, Dread Wolf?—because he then says, ”You look different.”
Rook’s brow crooks upwards. “Yeah, I hear the weight of the world’s fate is really good for the skin.”
His smile is wry. “I meant to say, I have never seen you without your Mourn Watch make-up. I almost failed to recognize you, at first. I used to wonder if it was tattooed on.”
She snorts, less at the fact that he noticed her lack of black lipstick and eyeshadow, and more at the notion that this is the first observation he reached for to end the most awkward silence she’d ever endured. “They don’t require us to wear it in the Mourn Watch, it isn’t a uniform. Though, I’m sure it would look good on Emmrich. Also, I’ve never dropped in on you in my pajamas. Wearing that shit to sleep isn’t so great on the pillowcase.”
He hums in reply. “I’d wondered if the link we shared would endure, but I didn’t expect you to use it.”
“Like I said, I didn’t mean to.”
“Would you like something to drink?” Solas questions abruptly. She stares at him, almost incredulously. Fen’Harel has a sense of hospitality. Wonders never cease.
“What do you have?”
“Fermented fruit juice. And ocean water, if that interests you.” Rook narrows her eyes in mock-thought at his sarcasm, like she’s truly considering the decision. It doesn't escape her that they have so easily fallen back into their pattern of jabs, like old dance steps.
“Fruit juice it is.” She answers. The minute the words leave her mouth, he rises quickly, like he is glad to have a task besides…whatever it is they’re doing here. He disappears into the small shack and returns with two wood-carved cups, handing one to her on his way back to his seat on the log.
Rook takes a tentative sip, and then another, longer drink of the strange liquid. It’s good, and strong, but she can’t quite place the flavor. She thinks about asking him if he made it himself or simply conjured it from the Fade, but doesn’t know if she can bear anymore small talk between them, so she doesn’t.
Silence, again. A long stretch of it. The sun has slipped under the horizon now, and the sky is turning deepening shades of purple and navy over them, revealing a brilliant array of stars as they quietly sip their drinks. Finally, he speaks. “I imagine reconstruction in Thedas is still well underway.”
Ah, business. Old habits and all that. She nods her head. “Progress is slow. It was the worst Blight the world has ever known, almost bad enough to make people forget it was the last of them. It will take a very long time for the world and the people in it to heal. But we have a chance. That’s the best we could ask for, under the circumstances.”
“Yes it is.” he agrees, though he’s looking at her strangely, as if debating with himself. “Rook, I would be remiss if I did not—”
“Don’t.” She hisses. It dizzies her how quickly she's gone from feeling awkward to feeling angry. “Let’s not do the whole remorse performance again, if you don’t mind.”
He frowns at her. The fucking nerve. “Have you no faith I can be sincere?”
Rook barks out a laugh, a bitter sounding thing, “Faith probably isn’t the best choice of words here, Dread Wolf.”
“You did not answer the question.”
She gapes at him. “You can’t seriously be asking me this after…after everything! The last time you so graciously apologized, you were manipulating me into tearing down the Veil for you. Of course I don’t have faith you can be sincere, you presumptuous bastard. Seeing is believing, and that’s not a side of you I ever met.”
“Didn’t you? I desisted my efforts to tear down the Veil, I chose another path—”
Rook scoffs. “Oh the graciousness of the great Dread Wolf. You agreed not to commit an unfathomable war crime, again. That should just make you a most trustworthy paragon of virtue in the minds of all, yes?"
His expression is almost pained at her biting sarcasm, which stokes the fires of her rage more than the cold contrarian she remembers him being. “I have no reason to lie to you now. Until the last time we spoke, I truly believed that I was doing the right thing for the world, and everything I did was in service to that belief. I know I did horrible things, Rook. Not the least of which were the things I did to you—”
“Please, stop—”
“—and I wish to take accountability for those things, to tell you how much I regret—”
“What, Solas?” She's already cut him off again before she realizes she's yelling. But she can't stop. “Maker, I've already been forced to hear all about the greatest hits of your regrets so far, I might as well get the full collection.” She sees it immediately, the way her harsh words cut right to the heart of exactly the ways he could feel vulnerable in her presence. And then she understands in an instant why she's lashing out. I want the fucker to know what that feels like. “Go on, then! I think we left off with you murdering your oldest friend and stealing her power for your own selfish bullshit. What’s next, Fen’Harel?”
She doesn't know if she expected poking at all his trauma in the spirit of meanness to feel good, but it doesn't.
Solas turns his entire body in her direction, and when he speaks, his gaze doesn’t waver from her eyes. “I regret killing my friend and forcing you to see his ghost. I regret that the first time I apologized for it was underpinned by ulterior motives.” She surprises herself by laughing humorlessly at that, which only stops him for a moment. “I regret Lace Harding's death, and using it to allow the prison to accept you in my place. And also, omitting the fact that killing Elgar'nan would sunder the Veil beyond repair.”
“This is a very comprehensive apology.” Rook mumbles.
His features betray annoyance, then. “I appreciate that very academic assessment.”
A flash of fury motivates her into setting her cup down in the sand aggressively and rising from her seat as she spits, “Do you really expect that to just smooth everything over? That everything you did to me can be fixed with the right words and sharing your weird fucking Fade fruit juice?”
He has no reaction to her physical escalation, simply staring up at her impassively. “Of course not, Rook. I did not apologize because I wanted to ‘smooth everything over.’ I simply owed you the apology. You need not accept it for that to be true.”
She deflates in an instant, finding his response to her hostility frustratingly decent. Unable to withstand the steadiness of his eyes on her, surely dissecting every shift in her facial expression, she ventures closer to the edge of the water on the beach and takes a deep breath of salty air through her nose to slow the furious beat of her heart.
When she hears him speak again, he’s closer; standing somewhere a few feet behind her, though she refuses to look back at him to discover exactly where. “If you weren’t looking for an apology, why did you come here?”
“I told you, it was an accident.”
“The fact remains that something within drew you here. What could that be, I wonder? Confirming I’m still confined, that the Veil remains safe from my machinations? Did you hope to find my regrets had consumed me, reduced me to a shadow of myself?”
She frowns as she speaks, glad for the fact that he can’t see her expression. “I don’t wish you ill, Solas. I believe in what you’ve said you’re trying to do, if you’re being honest about it.”
“Does it not stand to reason that I would have made some move to sunder the Veil in the time since we last spoke, were that truly my intention?”
She turns to face him, and finds he’s standing closer than she expected. It’s unusual, after mostly speaking with him across a wide chasm, to have him standing just a foot or two in front of her. “Thinking like that is how you lost to me, you know. You assumed you could predict me. I have never assumed the same of you.”
There’s a glint of something in his eye then, mirth, or perhaps even a hint of pride. “Technically, I conceded.”
“And if you hadn’t, I still would have beaten you. Whatever it would have taken, I’d have done it.”
“Perhaps such effort would have been sufficient.” He shrugs, noncommittal, but she doesn't miss how he glances away for just a beat, then returns his eyes to watch her carefully for the annoyance he must anticipate his response will ignite. Asshole.
Rook falls straight into the trap, eyes wide open as she does it. “Are you forgetting which one of us killed Elgar’nan in hand-to-hand combat?”
“Are you forgetting which one of us possesses the form of a giant, archdemon-slaying wolf, equipped with centuries of combat experience?”
“Is this how you're attempting to convince me you're not a threat? It's a fascinating strategy.” Something unsettling arises within as she counterpoints him; the horrible, creeping sensation of a smile fighting to appear on her face, one she hopes she squashes in time for him not to notice. And that's when it dawns on her, the sudden realization that she's…actually enjoying this. As it turns out, when the stakes are less than the very fate of the entire world, these verbal sparring matches with Solas are kind of…fun?
You always thought they were kind of fun, says a traitor somewhere inside her head.
“I am not trying to convince you of anything. I am—” he halts himself abruptly. The simultaneous silence and loudness of his thoughts as they flit across his face is not something she's accustomed to seeing from him; it serves only to unnerve her further. “I find I am enjoying your company. In spite of your—quite justified—distrust of me.”
Frankly, it would have surprised her less if he had suddenly started yodeling, or headbutted her out of nowhere, or did absolutely anything other than tell her that he was ‘enjoying her company.’
What the fuck is happening?
She notices him observing her freeze response to his admission curiously, mouth upturned, like he is quietly relishing the fact that he's rendered her speechless. Of course, he lets the silence hang there, like a noose around her neck that tightens the longer it takes for her to respond.
Finally, “Yeah, that sounds like fade jail isolation talking. You know, I have…things to do. I have to go “ Things to do? I'm asleep for fuck's sake. “This has been—”
Now, he is fully smiling at her, and it's deeply strange, both the fact that he's doing it and the fact that the traitor within finds it oddly endearing. “I understand. Return whenever you'd like, Rook. Dareth shiral.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and forces herself from the dream.