Chapter Text
Lonely is a Ring on a Cold Coffee Cup.
I’m some Sick Hound,
Digging for Bones.
It it Weren’t for Second Chances,
We’d All be Alone
Light blazed around them as they limped forward together, cyan crackling and blazing, then winking out and giving way to the greige edges of the Fade prison.
Solas stepped slowly onward with his head down. He did not look at the woman who kept even pace beside him, staring at his feet as they picked their careful way forward. He couldn’t. Not yet. Everything swam in and out of focus. There was no noise here, but there was a roaring in his ears. He felt stunned and strangely hollow. His lungs were raw with exertion and unspent emotion. Every bone ached, while archdemon blood burned at the corner of his mouth. His head throbbed and buzzed with the peculiar sensation of more held back tears.
His purpose had been tectonically altered. A course held for eons, suddenly diverted. Not necessarily unwelcome, but jarring beyond understanding. The ground beneath him blurred as he flexed his left hand. No calculation had accounted for this scenario. Things were truly not much better than he had left them in the mortal world, though the freed Evanuris were dead.
And Varric was dead. Solas winced and hissed out a breath.
The things he had spent millennia fighting for remained mostly unchanged. The Titans maintained their madness, Tevinter kept its slaves, and elves with no idea of their true heritage still lived in what alienages that weren’t yet choked by Blight. Hunger, horror, and violence touched everything. Permeated the living world like a plague.
He was still angry, at the world, at the loss of true freedom. At himself. But Solas was also intensely, fanatically, thankful for so much at this moment. He could not believe it. Mythal had freed him completely from her service. The dirthe’vhen’an had been dissolved. And though he had immediately pledged himself to another impossible purpose, this turn was so unexpected, the feeling of the choice so different. Even the anger was different.
He had chosen to follow Mythal to physical form, to be sure. And then he had chosen again to follow after her, begging for her to see the shift from her true purpose. Careening himself down a path from which he could see no alternate course again and again. Mistake after mistake. He had never truly seen anything but his death at the end. He had never allowed himself to truly hope for anything resembling a happy ending for anyone but his people, and even that tentative.
Grim and fatalistic, the woman next to him had once called him. But with a teasing tenderness that had made his heart stumble in his chest. He had and still felt undeserving of this second chance. He was somehow alive, he was very surprised to find, and not alone.
Not alone.
This was not the sort of latitude Solas had ever envisioned, for himself or anyone else. But there was a kind of freedom in the chance to make things better. To right as many wrongs as he could, to offer any guidance or protection at his disposal. The joy and relief inside of him bloomed against the injured pride and regret. Guilt curdled the edges of his heart but for now, it was drowned out by a helpless gratefulness he could not ignore.
He foggily kept his pace forward. He could hear Angharad’s feet, still in step with his, shuffling beside him. She had not said anything since they crossed into the Fade, but she was here, next to him. His senses danced around the shape of her without much focus. He was afraid to look at her, to speak. It was too much to believe. She was really here. Would she disappear if he concentrated on her too closely?
Solas stumbled slightly, and the fingers of her right hand tightened in the material at his shoulder. He felt her pause and turn toward him. She still said nothing. The Lavellan had always had the gift of companionable silence.
Standing together, Solas could feel her hand, even through the leather and metal of his armor, against his shoulder. It was so warm. So, so warm. He centered himself around that sensation, steadying, centering. Calming the rolling in his belly. He was so tired. He had been outmatched physically in every way today, and though he’d won, his body felt it clearly. He had sewn himself into the fabric of the Fade and waded through many lifetimes worth of trauma and regret in the space of days, hours, even.
She was somehow smaller than he remembered, or was that perhaps how much larger than life she had always seemed to him? Her hand slid from his shoulder to hold his cheek. Both a sigh and a shudder of heat ran through him at the sudden unbidden memory of touching her hip, marveling at how large his hands had looked against her deceptively delicate frame. He leaned his face into her hand, eyes closed.
“I forgive you,” she had said. She had vowed to walk through eternity with him, if that is what he desired. His Angharad had stood with waiting eyes, hovering halfway between their kiss. He had heard her silent question. Do you want this?
How many nights had he lain awake alone, aching to hold her, to touch her, to lose himself in both her mind and her body? The near decade between the last kiss they had shared loomed longer than a thousand of her lifetimes, and wouldn’t he know that vastness firsthand? It had never occurred to him to even hope to see her again, much less that she might traverse the rest of infinity at his side.
Banal nadas. Ar latha ma, vhenan. Worthy or not, he could not have said no. She would have accepted it, he knew, though he feared it would be the last time she asked. He thought refusing her even once more might have killed him.
He finally chanced a glance at her. Her hair was covered by a broad band of dark red cloth and though her face was in shadow, her verdigris eyes, that strange green-gray-blue, gleamed at him in the light of the Fade. She moved and if he had not been so very tired, he might have started, though she moved slowly, as if he were a startled halla. He was unoffended; he felt a little like a frightened deer.
She kept her hand on his cheek and stepped into his body, as if to hold him. Solas could not stop himself from crushing her into his chest and burying his face in the fabric that covered her hair. Her arms were trapped between them, only her prosthetic somewhat free. He held her so hard she could barely breathe, but Angharad did not mind. Neither was sure how long they stood there like that and neither offered to move away.
“I would like to find a place for us to rest, vhenan,” she said at last in Elvhen. Her grasp of the language was clearer and more confident than it had been all those years ago, when he had begun to teach her more than the smattering of words and phrases she had learned as a child. The memories of their lessons in the golden light of the rotunda were among his most cherished.
“Did you make a camp of some sort here?” Her eyes did not waver from his, though he could barely maintain her gaze. Her expression was gentle, waiting patiently.
Angharad could feel the fine tremor in him, see the exhaustion and crush of everything that had happened weighing on him. The bruise around his eye was blooming darker and she could not see the extent of his other injuries. Though she longed to throw herself at him and somehow kiss him and beat him in equal measure, her Dalish practicality made her put that desire on the back of the fire. She wanted to peel him out of that armor first, to check for broken ribs and warm him through the shock descending on him very quickly. To inspect every wound and address it, to touch every inch of him and assure herself that he was here, they were together, that this was reality. That he was alive-and-with-her-
The Inquisitor inhaled sharply. Cry later, she thought, and adjusted her focus back to the current task.
Solas blinked at her and the tears that had collected in the well of his eyes finally slid down his cheek and along his nose. They made Angharad’s chest ache. She could not stop herself from wiping them away with her thumb. He cleared his throat and blinked again, glancing up at the main large structure that still twirled slowly like a strange dark sun. She could see him breathe deep and attempt to steady himself. “Yes,” he said raggedly. “There.”
She turned, following his stare and blew out a breath in surprise. The sight of that queer, darkling horizon made her nervous. His hand rested automatically at her shoulder in a gesture he had repeated a thousand times on the balcony of her quarters at Skyhold.
Solas watched it happen almost as if he were outside himself, then began to register her all over again, alive and nestled so close. Somehow the instinctive step she had taken into him for their mutual comfort had grounded him a little, helped him swim up from his daze for a short time. How his body, too, had involuntarily reached for the foreign familiarity of her, despite its battered state. His longing for connection was reciprocated… and now … there were no more barriers.
His brain skittered away from that line of thinking. Too much, too soon.
“Is that,” she asked hesitantly, “the Black City? Like in those Maker stories?” Angharad had always been more than a little distrustful of the Chantry, however kind she may have been in her dealings with its members. Morrigan had kept her informed on the Veilguard’s activities during Rook’s imprisonment, but there had been no time to ask Rook what to expect here after their escape.
Solas, a little more clear-headed but not yet ready to consider the implications of his last thought, pulled her closer. It was absurd, but he was ever-so-slightly pleased at her continued wariness against anything to do with the Chantry. “Yes and no. It was once part of the original great city, Arlathan. It is part of the prison of the Evanuris.” He sighed wearily. “You have seen first hand how legends crawl across time, giving rise to the Chantry’s myths and legends. But it is empty now. There is no one here but us.”
“Mm,” she said. Curiosity and concern fought a brief battle. She had many, many more questions. Even through the frisson of his body so close, she could feel Solas weaving in place beside her, how labored his breathing was. The way his heart seemed to jump and start against her arm worried her far more than the Black City. She adjusted a familiar looking satchel at her side and squared her shoulders. “Alright,” she said and tilted her face back up at him. “How do we get up there?”
How had he only noticed her haversack? He could not turn the thought loose as he looked down at her. Why had it caught his attention now?
The Inquisitor was a meticulous and self-sufficient woman, most especially when it came to her personal effects. She had always packed lightly, with a deliberateness that he’d respected and admired. That same satchel had always languished somewhere near where she was currently resting her head. The first thing she had always done upon return to Haven or Skyhold was to immediately set it once more to readiness. If the bag appears, get your ass in gear, had once been a fond joke among the Inquisition’s scouts.
Solas smiled. He could not help it, though it cracked his lips. She knew she was coming with him. As long as he loved her, if there was any way for her to come with or after him, she would have. She dug into the things she loved, left claw marks. No creature alive was his equal in stubbornness save for Angharad Lavellan. Her willpower was unmatched. It was a bittersweet thought.
She saw the smile and felt her ears grow hot and her knees turn watery. His eyes, once a cool gray, were now the lovely hazy purple she’d found only in the coastal Free Marches sunrise. As if it had been handpicked from her memory. The smile made his eyes crease at the corners in that way she loved. His expression was still sad, still tired, but filled with such tenderness that it made her throat burn with tears.
Asking question after question, listening intently, anything to make him smile, the real, secret smile he only shows when you make him forget, she heard Cole whisper in the back of her mind. She smiled ruefully back through misty eyes, glittering up at him. I missed you so much, she wanted to say. But it could wait. The strain around his mouth was increasing. Instead, she hugged him a little harder, waited for him to find his feet.
Solas took a deep breath and slowly raised his still bleeding left hand, waved it through the air. Blue-green magic trickled through his fingers and he flung it away from them like water droplets, arcing and sizzling across empty space. His power crackled and a wind twisted through the Fade.
Angharad flinched as they were picked up gently, as if in a breeze. She did not have much beyond grip in her prosthetic hand, but she used it now to the best of its ability on Solas’ cuff. His body was warm and solid at her side, lessening her panic. She hissed as they spun upward with sharply increasing speed. The breeze became a gale, carrying them away with a dizzying swiftness. The world blurred and rotated madly. Then it stopped suddenly and they were hovering in a dimly lit room.
Angharad, surprised and a little unnerved at their unexpected spin through empty air, clung tightly to Solas’ sleeve. They floated a moment longer, then lit on a stone floor with a sigh of magic that felt like letting out a breath. He’d held her close to his chest through it, though, and it had been over before she had had a chance to be truly frightened. He held her still, leaning over and against her, sagging. She adjusted her haversack with a jerk and set her shoulder against his side, her good arm curling around his waist lest he fall to the floor.
His eyes were closed and he leaned against her more heavily than he would have liked. He took several deep breaths, remained still, and held her. She knew the pose. Sometimes pain and weariness were so intense, you did well simply to not fall down.
Angharad knew he desperately needed to be still and rest. She was genuinely surprised he was even still coherent. She rubbed her hand up and down his back and pressed a kiss against his heart before she peeked around him to search for a place to set him down. She had not lingered long enough to hear his heart kick and clatter at the casual affection.
Angharad was not surprised at the spartan state of the quarters he had chosen. There was a large desk and a dusty looking chair half pulled away from it. Papers and ink, though she did not know where he could have gotten them. A bowl shaped fountain protruded from the wall. Across the room, a low chaise lounge in a muddy green velvet, equally dusty, squatted at one end of the room next to a skinny end table. The only thing that dominated the room was a fresco on the wall behind it, half finished. It was of her.
She drew him toward it and the long chair, moving slowly and carefully so as not to jostle him. Studying it and trying not to weep. These paintings were not in his usual style. It was not a story, like others, or an event. He had not chosen the eye of the Inquisition to represent her here.
The only other image she had seen him paint of her had been on a fresco he had done somewhere in Orlais. The day he had removed her arm. But she was looking away there, as if he could not bear to show her face. She had thought in her lowest moments that perhaps she had not been important enough to detail, but secretly knew it was not true. She nudged him with her hip to lower himself to the chair and looked up at the painting, throat thick.
The Angharad on the wall faced the right, black hair gleaming long and straight behind her shoulders. Tree branches crept behind her head. Solas had painted the impression of golden light around her with dots and lines of pale yellow. He had rendered her with exquisite care, though the background seemed incomplete. It was all shades of green, half formed trees and flowers swimming behind her. Her figure wore only a cloth about the hips, but it was not lewd. She did not think it would have been even if he had not used her arm to cover her breasts. It felt more like… a plea, or a prayer. An altar.
Painted Angharad knelt above the room. Her living inspiration gazed up the length of thigh, to the curve of her midriff, skipped across the painted ribs. Her left arm, rendered in the ghostly green of the Fade, clutched her bow behind her, so far only an impression. She looked down, unsmiling but not cold, at her open palm.
Rook had told her of his original nature, described the image they had seen in the mural at the Lighthouse in one of their rare, brief meetings. The white many limbed figure seemed to glow there above her painted hand. She drew a shaky breath and dashed the back of her good hand against her eyes. There would be time enough to think and absorb things later. All the time she could need. There were more urgent things to attend to. She looked down at Solas.
He had watched her look at the fresco, seen her hand flex with the familiar urge to touch it. He didn’t understand the range of emotions that crossed her face, but they made him want to pull her back into his arms.
“Vhenan-” he began, attempting to lean up.
She shook her head and gently urged him back with her fingertips. “Settle now,” she told him and slid her haversack to rest at her knees. He was too tired to frown at her, so he sighed and did as he was bid, reclining against the back of the couch. She withdrew a small skein of loosely-wound white linen bandages, a jar of ointment, a bottle, and a folded piece of fabric. She set them on the small circular table next to him. “Is the water here potable?”
Solas confirmed with a murmur and she crossed the room. He watched Angharad through heavy lids as she rinsed and filled the urn he had left beside the fountain weeks ago.
He could not help it, though he was still dizzy and the world reeled dangerously when he turned his head too far to the right. He did not want to let her out of his sight, lest she disappear. He could still scarcely believe that she was here at all, and not some ghost conjured by the prison to torment him. The room was dim and with his vision altered by pain, he could barely make her out in the shadows of his room here. But her scarlet sash and hair cover blazed out in the darkness against her black coat and he could make out enough to track her through the room.
Angharad rather thought it eerily similar to being watched by a wounded wolf as she made her way back to him, balancing the base of the urn against her more sturdy prosthetic forearm. She was not afraid, though. He was her wolf. She set the urn on the floor within easy reach and leaned over Solas, feeling around the seams of his armor for their ties.
He caught her wrist and chuckled, tugging her into his lap. The light of his power shimmered between them, armor dissolving, giving way to a simple breeches. She was somehow incredibly surprised to see the jawbone necklace laying darkly against his breast bone.
Her breath caught and she suddenly felt self conscious of his gaze on her coupled with an edge of hysteria. She realized suddenly that she had very rarely seen him without his shirt. He had so seldomly let their passions get that far. His tunic pushed up while her hand ran up the plane of his belly-
There was nothing Angharad could do to prevent the blush that spread across her face and neck, both in seeing him thus and in embarrassment that her first thought was lust instead of concern for the great black bruise that was blooming on his ribcage, the jagged cuts too numerous to count. She slid her fingers to the edge of the swelling on his side, unable to meet his gaze. “Nice trick,” she said primly.
Maker’s teeth, they had never even seen each other naked . And here she’d clamored after him into the Fade, practically marrying him over the body of a dead God. Of course, that had sort of been the plan, but now that it was done and over, the weight of it alarmed her all over again. And here he was, underneath her, all hot skin and sad eyes, as close to bare as she had ever seen him.
Solas, though wounded and dazed, had caught the flash of desire in her eyes and the flush that followed. His body attempted to answer and it made him laugh. He doubted he could even stand without assistance. Instead, he pulled his legs to him, drawing her deeper into his arms. He used his chin to slide the cover away from her head as he gathered her close, breathing in the airy, sweet cream scent of her soap.
Some of her hair spilled out, satin-black. He couldn't see its length. He could smell the almost spicy scent of her skin coupled with the dreamy soap, even under the scents of battle: fire, fearsweat, and smoke. He resisted the urge to bury his face in her neck and inhale her. This was a rediscovery of the real thing, not her shade scented from the fringes of her dreams. He had stalked her, ravenous, through the Fade for over a decade, even as she had hunted him across Thedas. He had been so hungry for her presence, he had guiltily endured their mutual torture. Even when he hated himself for his lack of self-control, for his addiction to even a glimpse of her. He rested his cheek against the top of her head.
She turned her face into him. Solas could feel her breath against his skin, her eyelashes fluttering as she kissed the space above his heart. He wondered if she could feel how hard it thudded. He had a fleeting thought that he wished he could have brought her here in his arms to somewhere beautiful, not to a barren room while holding up a broken man.
He shook his head. His mind was trying to keep up, kept tripping over itself to make sense of the myriad of rapid events that had occurred over the past few days. But there was too much, a cacophony of thoughts and feelings, all rushing to be processed.
In his many years, he had seen any number of young fighters after a great and terrible battle. After seeing too many. Trembling, blind with the memory of what they had seen and experienced. Sword shock, he’d heard it called, sometimes soldier's heart. He wondered dimly if that was what he was experiencing now, the way his thoughts were tumbling over each other and his emotions swarmed him.
Without realizing how it had happened, or even that it had, Angharad caught the edge of his thought. Nothing truly formed, only an impression of what he was feeling. An almost image. Tears prickled in her eyes. She kissed his skin again to comfort him: her poor melancholy man, with his guilty, yearning heart.
Solas was so many things -arrogant, petulant, sensitive, brave and so heartbreakingly wise and sad. If she allowed herself, she could wax poetic about him for days. She had chased him across the world, never giving up, despite the very vocal concerns of her friends and family. Even when she raged at him, mourned him, craved him, hated him just a little, she had never stopped loving him. Even when she doubted herself, she had never stopped missing him. The nights he had been strong enough to pry himself from her dreams, she had wept and tore at her sheets in her sleep.
Perhaps that is why, when the compulsion came, what moved through her did not register as anything but emotion. Had her grandmother not done something much the same, combing out the bad dreams when she was a little girl, wove blessing into her braids? Angharad had whispered prayers into her siblings’ hair on their wedding days as she helped prepare them, into the clothes she had sewn for their children. She wanted to do something like that for him.
Angharad splayed her fingers against his chest and rubbed her lips against his collarbone, breathing toneless words of affection. She willed her love into his skin, her hope, her faith in him. Pressed healing and understanding into the fabric of his being with her body entirely. She had never possessed a natural talent with magic, but this was something she understood on some ancient, instinctual level.
Solas’ breath came out in a hitching sob as he raised a hand to cup the nape of her neck. If it was magic that flowed through Angharad, neither realized. Her love washed over him, something more than words or music. He shuddered, felt suddenly drawn bowstring taut and exposed. Tears he could not stop poured down his face and his chest spasmed as he tried to control the gasp trying to claw its way out.
She stretched up toward him, kissed the edge of his chin. “You are allowed to cry, Solas.” Her voice sounded thick and he could feel her own tears dripping down his neck. His jaw was clenched so tightly his teeth ground together, throat working. “I am here, vhenan.” She drew in a shaking breath, sniffled, held him tighter. “I’ve got you.”
The dam in his heart burst apart. His body convulsed, curled in on itself on a wail. He had been struggling to keep his mind in order since he had turned away from Rook, had told her thank you. A whirling onslaught of emotions mated with fatigue and pain until he was blind and dumb with it. The bitter centuries of mistakes, betrayal, being betrayed, waking up alone and afraid far too many times rushed out of him. The raw, too-bright light of forgiveness and the foreign emptiness of shed burdens. All of it caught him and thrust him into the whirlpool.
Solas clutched Angharad tightly, buried his face in her hair. He sobbed until he could not breathe, until his eyes hurt. This woman had been cast into chaos by his hand, came out roaring and brilliant. She had turned those star-bright eyes on him, saw into and through him. The Inquisitor had loved him slowly and steadily, supporting him with her stalwart spirit at his back. He had been helpless against her compassionate curiosity, her thoughtful tending.
Even when they’d argued, she was kind and considerate. The first time she had calmly told him she would come back to continue their talk after she calmed down and had a chance to consider what he had to say, he had been floored. And he had lied to her, betrayed her, taken her arm, broken her heart.
He could feel his lungs fighting for air, how the hot tears made his cuts sting, the clenching of his abdominal muscles making his bruises burn. Even with what he had done, she was here. She wanted to be here with him. She had forgiven him.
You do not deserve it, he heard as an echo in his mind. He shut his eyes tighter. Then he couldn’t breathe at all. His lungs simply would not cooperate and his whole body trembled violently. His mouth opened and closed, his teeth snapping together.
Angharad held him while sobs wracked him, rocked them both gently. She did nothing to prevent her own tears. Others had held her when she had wept over him in much the same way. For a time, Dorian had crawled into her bed every night for weeks because he couldn’t bear the sound of her cries. How could she do anything but hold Solas through it? She had had her friends and family to carry her through her dark nights of the soul. He’d had no one, would not allow them close enough.
They stayed like that for a long time. Gradually, his gasping sobs subsided and his breath returned to a steadier pace. She touched the base of his throat, ran her palm over his collar bone. Her lips were cool on his flesh but her hands were hot. Each was equally soothing. Her breath felt like morning on his skin, warm and gentle.
Solas lay still and absorbed her voice and touch, though he couldn’t truly understand what she was saying. She sounded very far away and he had always had to pay close attention when she spoke in her native tongue. She murmured to him in the strange dialect she’d spoken when they had first met, a creole of Elvhen, common, and the many languages of the Free Marches. Little by little, the tension eased in him.
He no longer felt as if he would spin off into the void or crumble at her feet, even though tears still poured down his cheeks. He felt a little steadier, somehow seen, but weary to his bones. Wrung dry.
Angharad pressed trembling kisses against his skin. Her head ached a little and the tears rolling down her cheeks felt too hot.
Eventually, she felt his hand hang heavier on the back of her neck and heard his breath run slower and deeper. She chanced to look at him. His eyes were closed, the lashes laying spiky with moisture on his cheeks. His freckles, a secretly beloved treasure, stood out starkly against his white face.
It was a little selfish, but she lingered to stare at his profile. How had he grown even more handsome? Even covered in wounds, the lines of his face looked like they’d been carved from marble. Everything about him was all hard angles, only juxtaposed by his lovely soft mouth. She had used to wonder what he looked like as a boy. Now she knew had never gotten the chance. He’d had no loving hands to guide him in the beginning.
What was it like to spring to life as an adult? To stuff a being of pure magic and emotion into a machine built of flesh and blood? It sounded terrifying to change one's nature by its very definition. That is what had floored her more than any information she’d accumulated about him over the years. It was no wonder he felt things so deeply but was unable to process his emotions and move forward. Who had been there to teach him? A connection was made suddenly, but it, too, went in the ‘later’ box.
Angharad had learned much in her years away from him. She would not be able to do this healing for him the way she had envisioned, would not be able to carry him through as if he were a damsel in need of rescuing. A healer she may be, but there were limitations. What she could do was be at his side, support him, and try to help where she could. She could love him.
Slowly, so as not to wake him, she crawled backwards, then sat on the edge of the long chair. She knelt there, rubbing her hands over face and feeling very worn down and a little lonely.
Angharad did not regret her decision but she had not told her family of her plans. Only Rook, Morrigan, Dorian, and Aislin knew. It was not about a lack of support. Her siblings loved her and knew of her intense struggles when it came to her relationship with the Dread Wolf. They would have understood, even if they might have protested initially. The letters she had left were not enough, but she supposed they would have to be. Her future had been so up in the air, she had not wanted to burden them with uncertainties.
She had never experienced more fear than during her mad dash to the throne room mere hours before. Not because Solas had changed form, but seeing how small he looked compared to the Archdemon as it slung him the way a dog threw their favorite toy. Hearing him growl and whimper as he was dashed about, seeing his blood, more than she had ever seen without a battlefield, hitting the stone in a great steaming curtain. She could still smell it in the air, copper and the wild ozone scent of Solas’ Fade magic.
The last year of her life, possibly more, had been endless battles. One campaign to the next, meeting with nobles and kings, begging for alliances, for Orlais to listen to reason. Time spent with family and friends, even resting, had grown more and more rare. And the last few days blurred together. She had no idea when she had last eaten or slept.
The plan Rook had come up with, much to Morrigan’s surprise, had been fleshed out weeks earlier. Before she had ever been locked into the prison Lavallen would now call her home. Varric had been right, she mused, Rook really could work almost anything out given the chance. Only she and Morrigan knew exactly how close they both had come to not making it to the final battle. Angharad had been interrupted shortly before they had left for the Eluvian, by someone she had not expected to see at all.
Angharad shook herself and stood. She wasn’t sure how she felt about all of that right now, so she shoved it to the side, as well. She knew later she, too, would slip into her own tailspin. It was inevitable, but she could have some say in the when and where. Perhaps extreme compartmentalization was not the most healthy exercise, but it had served her well. Right now, she had work to do.
The Inquisitor returned to the bubbling fountain, washed her hands and face, and smoothed back her hair. She was glad there was no mirror. The reflection would be disheartening. She could bathe properly and wash her hair after she slept. First to patch him up. She wasn’t sure if he still required it. What sort of healing capabilities did an ancient spirit man have? Better to be safe than sorry. Once upon a time, she had bandaged him up regularly.
The memory made her smile as she sat next to him, reaching for the wound cleanser. He was forever getting singed by errant balls of fire, usually by his own hand. For an Elvhen god, he was very… mortal sometimes. It was when she liked him best. She wondered if Rook had believed her stories about the lonely elven apostate she had known in the infancy of the Inquisition.
He winced at the sting of the alcohol in the wash she applied but didn’t completely wake up. She murmured in sympathy as she systematically cleaned his wounds. Once finished, Angharad eyed the folded cloth still on the table. There were more than enough places on him in need of stitching, though she hated the doing of it. She could clean a halla or kill a man without flinching, but something about the pull of thread through skin had always turned her stomach. Ah, well, it couldn’t be helped.
She pushed through it, tried to be swift and efficient, and somewhat succeeded. Most of the stitches were small and even. Mercifully, he didn’t do more than stir fitfully and willingly turned over when she bid him. She idly wished for access to the pharmacopeia she and Morrigan had built together over the years, then dismissed the thought immediately. There had been no room for more than the barest essentials in her small bag, and with the final stand so sudden, no time to grab anything else but the go-bag.
Perhaps he would have healed better or faster with what she could do with such medicines, but he would not die. This would have to do. She applied ointment and bandages where they were needed with quick competence. Wrapping his midsection had been tricky as he was currently mostly dead weight, but she managed it, even with only the one functioning arm. The bite on his hindquarters had proved to be nastier than she had anticipated but there didn't seem to be a good way to arrange him without laying on a wound. In the end, she angled him as best she could.
Exhausted, she left her things as they were and wriggled back up his body. She wedged herself somewhere between beside and on top of him, her back pressed to rough velvet. His arms settled around her and she let herself sink into his chest. It didn’t matter if her arm would fall asleep or if she would have a crick in her neck.
She touched the jawbone necklace, the metal of her hand inside the glove feeling strangely more heavy than usual.
They both slept and dreamed.