There's Many References In This Old Piece (and By Many I Mean Like Four)

From the old artworks. ❤ G a r r u s ❤

Me, reading my fic drafts: Damn this is pretty good, when's the author gonna finish it?

I hate the idea of hiding stories from people who don't have an Ao3 account - it's not fair to them when they want to enjoy fanfic. But with AI being such a monster in the writing space, I might have to lock my stories as well. I know there's a good chance it won't stop AI from taking my art, but it's better than doing nothing. This shit sucks

AO3 has been scraped, once again.

As of the time of this post, AO3 has been scraped by yet another shady individual looking to make a quick buck off the backs of hardworking hobby writers. This Reddit post here has all the details and the most current information. In short, if your fic URL ends in a number between 1 and 63,200,000 (inclusive), AND is not archive locked, your fic has been scraped and added to this database.

I have been trying to hold off on archive locking my fics for as long as possible, and I've managed to get by unscathed up to now. Unfortunately, my luck has run out and I am archive locking all of my current and future stories. I'm sorry to my lovelies who read and comment without an account; I love you all. But I have to do what is best for me and my work. Thank you for your understanding.

maomao’s dedication to ignoring jinshi’s real identity is truly inspiring. the woman who has solved multiple murders based on minor clues in the environment keeps looking at every sign pointing to jinshi being royalty and going “damn, this could add up to something. good thing I can’t do math!”

Chapter 6: Wherein a God Knows Hunger (Even Gods Need Miracles)

Summary:

In the safety of the Fade, Lavellan takes initiative in their budding relationship, and Solas discovers a level of want and desire that surprises even him.

On Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61703029/chapters/162111184

She starts making a point of visiting him in the rotunda at least once a day, if only to say hello. She recommends a book to him — a fascinatingly biased history of Halamshiral and the Dales that she confesses makes her “irrationally angry” — and they spend several hours and several glasses of wine discussing it and the role of propaganda and mythmaking in war and history. He goes to bed that night dizzy and drunk on a heady blend of connection and companionship. 

It begins a back-and-forth exchange of recommended books, followed by late nights and in-depth conversations, either by a hearth in Skyhold or around a campfire out in the wilds. His heart pounds hard and giddy in his chest for what feels like hours after she says goodnight, leaving him restless, unable to relax, captured by thoughts of her voice and her laugh and the way she lightly touches his arm every time she gets up to leave.

Even as the warnings creep around the edges of his mind. That this is dangerous, uncharted territory. That he ought to put a stop to things now before he gets in over his head.

Some mornings, he even rises with the resolve to do just that. To distance himself and remember his secrets, his goals, why he is with the Inquisition in the first place. But then he steps outside and she’s there, glowing in the morning sun, and she smiles that smile seemingly reserved only for him.

And his resolve is forgotten. 

. 

She comes to him in their dreams, though he isn’t sure how she’s able to find him given she has no experience walking the Fade. He has recently turned this area of the Fade into a mirror of the rotunda, using it to plan and practice the frescos he wants to paint in the waking world, and he’s deep in concentration when she steps into the space as casually as she does in the actual Skyhold, her expression brightening the instant she sees him.

“Solas, I was hoping to find you,” she says. “I’ve been wanting to talk more about you and your studies, but I keep getting sidetracked. Do you have a moment?”

So that is how she found him. She must have fallen asleep thinking of him — at least in some capacity — and it carried through to her dreams, drawing her through the Fade. He should be most interested in the power of her mind, to accomplish such a thing, and he is, but…

She was thinking of him. As she lay in bed. He was her last, most powerful thought before she slipped into sleep.

That knowledge makes him feel unsteady, his clothes suddenly too warm.

“You continue to surprise me.” He sets down the paper he’d been using to sketch ideas. It can wait for another night. “All right, let us talk. Preferably somewhere more interesting than this.”

On instinct, he leads her from the rotunda of the Fade back to Haven. Quiet, empty, intact. Snow coating the ground and the village roofs, drifting in slow, scattered flakes from the sky. The Breach as it once was piercing the distant sky, high up in the mountains. Even as he forms it, he realizes that part of him wishes they were back here, where they’d first truly met and the Inquisition had been smaller and they had had more time just to exist near one another in the cold, sharp air and the snow.

It feels fitting, as well, to take her to the cell where he’d kept watch for so many days. “I sat beside you while you slept, studying the Anchor.”

An insufficient description of what those long hours had been. Tending to her. Healing her again and again. Certain at every moment she would be lost. That he would lose her because he’d miscalculated with Corypheus and she had paid the price. Just like the People had with the Veil.

Her smile is soft, gentle. “I’m glad someone was watching over me.”

It’s a tenderness he doesn’t deserve, and yet he feels himself bend toward it. He wishes he could tell her it had been altruistic, that he’d simply cared about her because she was a person, like Varric had. But it had been a self-serving mix of guilt, ambition, and fascination. 

“You were a mystery,” he says instead. Half-truths upon half-truths. “You still are. I ran every test I could imagine, searched the Fade, yet found nothing. Cassandra suspected duplicity. She threatened to have me executed as an apostate if I didn’t produce results.”

She hmphs, the sound both amused and disapproving. “Cassandra’s like that with everyone.”

That, he certainly agrees with as he turns and leads her out of the chantry, back into the clear, cold air and snow. He tries to find the words to explain…everything. How it felt to sit beside her as the mark attempted to consume her and the Breach grew. There are so many layers beneath it that he cannot tell her.

The dread that he’d ruined this world just like he had with his own.

The dozen or so different plans, calculations, contingencies he tried to make to fix things, to save himself, to save his plans.

He’d even considered returning to uthenera and sleeping away another few millennia. Everything was already so broken; perhaps he could wake again in another four thousand years with a clearer path on how to set things right.

Except then…

He wraps his fingers around her bare wrist, thrusts her hand toward the rift. For a heartbeat, he isn’t sure it will work – she shouldn’t even be alive right now, let alone walking and fighting, with a strong, steady pulse he can feel against his fingertips. But then, a rush of Fade magic rips through her arm, spears upward, and the rift snaps shut in an explosion of vibrant green.

Solas turns to face her. There are snowflakes scattered through her hair and dusting her clothes. The green of her eyes burns vibrant against Haven’s snow-covered landscape. “You had sealed it with a gesture. And right then…I felt the whole world change.”

She steps toward him, an eyebrow raised, a slight grin curling her lips. “Felt the whole world change?”

“A figure of speech,” he says, because that is true but also not wholly the truth and he is not fooling either of them with it.

“I’m aware of the metaphor.” She closes the rest of the distance between them, near enough now to touch. “I’m more interested in ‘felt.’”

He is caught by her gaze, and he has no will to free himself because the way she is looking at him in this moment is the only thing that matters in the world. She is seeing him — just him — and he is seeing her, and how had he never realized the simple, powerful beauty of such a thing? She is utterly terrifying, shaking him to his very foundations, and she is also the only true source of joy he has ever known. She unmoors him even as she gradually becomes his definition of home.

He takes in a shuddering breath and says, “You change…everything.”

She shakes her head, smiling. “Sweet talker.”

He turns back to the recreation of the Breach, his pulse hammering loud in his ears because he is teetering dangerously close to the edge. That was too much to admit, too honest, too vulnerable. He should not be standing here, wishing for more, wanting to —

Her hand cups his jaw, turning his face toward her as she leans into him, and in the instant he recognizes what is about to happen, all he can think is Please and Yes before she kisses him.

The warm press of her mouth, the taste of her against his lips, the scent of her skin — desire flares in his chest with an intensity that shocks him.

But then she pulls away, worry sweeping across her face as she steps back, unsure of the boldness of what she’d just done. She starts to turn from him, to flee, but that desire is burning against his ribs and he reaches for her, tugs her back into him. He captures her mouth with his, and the sound she makes — somewhere between a gasp and a whimper — lights up his entire body.

He is no stranger to the physical act of sex. In the early days after forming his body, before war and rebellion blotted out everything else, the courts of Elvhenan had been rife with such passions, and he had been the consort of it more than once. Hotblooded and cocky, delighting in the feel of being desired, but not much more than that. It had been passing fancies; nothing like this. This want.

He has never wanted like this before.

He deepens the kiss, desperate, starving for her, weeks and weeks of longing for this very thing. She parts her lips beneath his with a soft moan — barely audible — and there is nothing he wouldn’t do to hear her make that noise again. He tightens his arms around her waist, digs his fingers into her hips to pull her closer. The sensation of her body fitting so tightly and perfectly against his is intoxicating, heat spreading low in his stomach, filling his head with new wants, new desires —

We can’t do this, he thinks and pulls away only to see her — breathless, flushed, hunger in her eyes as she looks up at him — and kiss her again. A compulsion. How can he be expected to stop when her hand is cradled against the side of his face and the other is twisted into his shirt, gripping him like a lifeline? Or, perhaps more accurately: she is the lifeline for him, keeping him from drifting away.

You cannot be doing this. You are not her lover. You cannot be.

Pushing away from her is painful, and she looks dazed at the abruptness, blinking in the filtered sunlight.

“We shouldn’t,” but even as he says it, he doesn’t fully mean it. “It isn’t right. Not even here.”

She frowns. “What do you mean, ‘even here’?”

“Where did you think we were?”

She glances around at Haven, at the Breach in the sky that has been closed and gone for weeks. “This isn’t real.”

She didn’t know they were dreaming, and in a way, that makes her finding him like she did even more impressive. What it might say as to the strength and intensity of their connection, he should not think about right now, not with the taste of her still tingling on his lips.

“That’s a matter of debate,” he says, “probably best discussed after you wake up.”

 ***

He jolts upright in bed, kicking off his tangled blankets and sheets. The chill air of his quarters hits his bare skin, and he is grateful for it because he is still burning from the feel of her, his heartbeat too fast, his skin too hot. He swings his legs over the side of the bed, pressing his feet flat against the cold stone floor, and stays like that for a long time. Until his pulse slows and his desire finally cools and he can rise to dress for the day.

Though it does not keep his mind from spinning.

That was a mistake. I will make that clear as soon as I see her today.

Perhaps she feels differently now that she’s awake. Perhaps she will not come to me, she will be embarrassed or regret having done it.

It would be best for both of us if she regrets it.

He says these things to himself, at every moment knowing that if she does regret their kiss, it will leave a deep gash in his chest.

It is early. Most of the castle is not yet up as he walks empty corridors to the rotunda. Another hour or so before Skyhold’s day truly begins, which means he has likely twice that amount of time until he can expect to see her, at the earliest.

But he underestimates her.

Not ten minutes after he enters the rotunda, the door to the main hall opens, and he hears the familiar cadence of her footsteps against the flagstones. She is dressed in the old, worn-in pants and the soft tunic that he’s noticed are her favorites for when she wants to be comfortable, barefoot, her hair undone from its usual braids. She must’ve come straight and hurriedly from bed.

She stops a few steps away, leaning a hip against the edge of his desk, and the spark in her eyes as she meets his gaze is all delight and mischief. He can’t seem to stop himself from responding in kind.

“Sleep well?” he asks, and though his voice is perfectly casual, he can’t completely suppress a smile.

“I’ve never done anything like that before,” she admits with a laugh. “On a number of levels.”

This is the moment. To cut things off. To emphasize what a poor decision it was and how it will not be happening again. He needs to be firm about it for both their sakes. He knows this.

But when he speaks, the words come out too warm and soft. Hesitant. “I apologize. The kiss was impulsive and ill considered, and I should not have encouraged it.”

She arches a brow, her smile infectious and full of trouble. “You say that, but you’re the one who started with tongue.”

He huffs. “I did no such thing.” But even the mention of it has his eyes drifting to her mouth, remembering, wanting.

“Does it not count if it’s only Fade-tongue?”

He lets out a breathy chuckle. “It has been a long time, and things have always been easier for me in the Fade.” A hesitation. A deep breath. He stares into her eyes, sees her spirit, and he is weak. He cannot sever himself from her. It would feel like a mortal blow. “I am not certain this is the best idea. It could lead to trouble.”

She is undaunted. “I’m willing to take that chance, if you are.”

Is he? She cannot know how big of a chance it is. What a risk it poses. He has made so many plans, and she has torn them all asunder by simply existing. By touching his face and taking his hand one random day in the aftermath of a battle and igniting something brand-new inside him.

“I…maybe, yes. If I could take a little time to think. There are…considerations.”

“Take all the time you need,” she says with real empathy and warmth, and he thanks her for it.

But deep inside he knows his answer. It’s already written on his heart.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your mental health is to imagine that you're a little mouse in a children's book series who lives in a hollow tree, and spend time planning out how your home would look, and where you'd put the larder where you keep all your jars of homemade blackberry jam, and what kind of cake you'd make to bring to the party that Mr Vole is throwing on Sunday.

People playing Elden Ring and looking for the "good" demigod to root for are missing the point. Pick your favorite mass murdering war criminal megalomaniac with mommy issues and endlessly simp for them like the rest of us, cowards.

Oat milk is made by milking goats and then putting the milk through a fine filter to extract all the "G"s

do me a solid and just reblog this saying what time it is where you are and what you’re thinking about in the tags.