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The child was fed, clean, and comfortable, the healer claimed, and yet it still screamed.
It was a tiny human thing, hardly more than a month old, and Solas regarded it in its lonely basket, tucked to the side and out of the way, with pity disguised as disdain. The healer had more pressing matters to deal with — but one squalling infant was enough to drive an entire camp insane.
“Entertain it if you like,” the healer snapped, flapping a hand at him dismissively. “It’s got no mother to tend it, so I made sure it wasn’t dying and that’s that. I’ve other things to tend to.”
Solas scoffed. “Surely you can see that I am no caretaker? You cannot be serious.”
The healer sighed and resumed washing her bloodied bandages over the fire. “Unless you can find someone else to carry it around and soothe it? If you want it to stop screaming, that’s your course of action. Otherwise leave me be.”
He turned towards the basket again, where the baby lay ensconced in the remains of someone’s laundry. Its little fists were clenched beside its cheeks, its eyes screwed up into puckered slits as it wailed with its toothless mouth. Solas thought that it was the ugliest creature he had ever seen.
He looked around. Every other remaining member of the Inquisition seemed engaged in some other task involved with survival, now that Haven had burned. Their Herald led them towards their destination — Skyhold — but it was still days away. And Solas was restless.
He stooped then and scooped the child from its makeshift bed. It wriggled, limp and weak and strange, until he managed to cradle it properly in the crook of his arm with his hand cupping its tiny head. It ceased its screaming and stared, open-mouthed, up into Solas’s face.
“There, now,” he said, as if to an adult, “that was unreasonable, don’t you think?”
It hiccuped. A little line formed between its brows as it studied him.
He looked it over, cataloguing its strangeness. In his time, only animals were birthed and raised this way — elves were created and formed in the Fade, emerging fully formed when they chose to take a physical vessel. They did not emerge, screaming, from their mother’s bloodied body, covered in fine hair and lacking teeth or nails or proper eyesight. Not like this bizarre little thing.
He absentmindedly ran his thumb along the curved shell of the human’s ear. It made a curious sound, like a cooing bird, and reached its fine-boned hand until it took hold of his finger.
“That is my hand,” he told it. “Your own will work well enough one day, when you have developed fine motor skills. That may take some practice.”
It frowned again, focusing intensely on his mouth as he spoke. He smiled slightly, and it mimicked him.
“Ah! So you learn, even at this stage. Curious thing.”
He tucked it more securely to his chest, supported between both arms, and wandered away from the oppressive scents and noise of the circle around the healer. He walked on the hard crust of snow, aimless and unmoored, until he found shelter from the sun between a few young evergreens. The child stared up at his face the entire time, smiling and frowning in quick succession. It never let go of his finger.
“There,” he said. “Now I can hear myself think.” He looked down at the child with a frown. “I wonder what you are thinking. Can you think?”
It cooed and reached its free hand up towards his face. Its fine little nails scratched at his chin until he pulled away.
“You may very well be mindless,” he surmised mildly. “But no matter. That comes later, in any case. You need only listen and learn and absorb, hopefully in a way that leaves your mind open to possibilities. Although —” He glanced back towards the camp, his eyes falling upon the robed form of a chantry sister — “perhaps that is too much to expect in a world such as this.”
The babe babbled, its expression very serious.
He chuckled. “Indeed! What these humans could teach you would be equal parts inane and inconsequential, however culturally relevant. But…” He trailed off with a sigh. “I suppose that cannot be helped.”
It squalled, shaking its little fist, as if in protest. It ended its little shout with a trailing string of “ba-ba-ba-ba”s. Solas drew his finger along the tiny bumps of its knuckles.
“Strange thing,” he murmured. “How curious that you should survive and your mother should not. Any other creature saves itself before its defenseless offspring. But not that human.”
The babe cooed, then shouted again, as if testing the volume of its voice.
“Ah, certainly!” he laughed. “How lucky! Or unfortunate. I have not decided.” He frowned, considering. “Perhaps it is not for me to decide, in the end. Nor you. It simply… is.”
There was a whispering breath — a gasp, a twist in the Veil — and Solas detected the lightest of footsteps behind him.
“Silent, cold, crushed, one hand reaching from the stones,” Cole murmured, stepping within a hair’s breadth of Solas’s elbow. He reached around him and touched the baby’s face. “Her mother is silent now. The healer snatched her up on her way out of Haven. Seeing you hold the baby she saved makes the sadness clutch her heart a little less.”
The baby stared, wide-eyed, at Cole. It hardly reacted to the touch on its cheek at all, entranced instead by the dirt-smudged wanness of the boy’s face. Solas noticed that its eyes were nearly the same color as Cole’s.
“Thank you for telling me,” Solas said. “The baby is a she?”
Cole was frozen, eyes locked with the infant as if with wonder. “Yes. Her mother called her beauty bug, snuggle-bee, baby-bean. She called her Rose.”
The boy moved his finger along the curved outline of the baby’s cheek, then tentatively tapped the tip of her nose. She blinked, confused.
“Rose. A simple enough name.” Solas watched Cole for a moment longer, then lifted Rose higher in his arms until he could offer her like a wrapped loaf of bread. “Would you like to hold her?”
Cole gasped. “I can? What if I —”
“You will not,” Solas said, firmly but calmly. He settled Rose’s swaddled body into Cole’s bent arms, cradling her head in his palm until Cole could support it in the crook of his elbow. “There, watch her head.”
Cole looked like a scarecrow bearing a bundle of squash. He was still, as if terrified to shift at all in case he dropped the baby, but still fixed his eyes on her as if she were the only thing left in the world. She waved her fists under his chin, babbling.
“You are so small,” he whispered. “But you are so full of needs and wants. Not hungry, not tired, but… held, warm, looked at. Smile.”
The baby ceased its babbling, then grinned its toothless grin. Cole’s grip on her relaxed slightly until he wasn’t quite so tense. The corner of his lip twitched.
“She likes you,” Cole said suddenly. “She liked to hear you talk. Say something else.”
Solas frowned. “I fail to see how this is relevant —”
The baby cut him off with a delighted squall, her fists waving from her swaddle until her thumb bumped Cole’s nose.
The boy grinned. “See? Tell her a story. She’d like that.”
Solas drew nearer, sighing. He caught Rose’s unfocused gaze and felt his own soften. “Alright, da’len. I have one tale I can tell.”
Rose listened to his story about a Qunari baker until her eyes began to loll shut. Once they had, Cole carefully laid her sleeping body back into Solas’s arms.
“Keep talking,” Cole whispered, already fading to nothing. “She likes the vibrations too.”
Cole was right. As Solas returned to the circle of humans some distance away, he continued to murmur tales to the sleeping child in his arms — as he did she nuzzled closer to his chest until her fingers curled in the loops of his sweater. He held her head close, cupped in the breadth of his hand, and told her of the spirit who guided village girls to boys whose hearts were full of gentle kindness.