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By the time Felassan came to court, everyone knew that Solas was Mythal's lover. And everyone knew that she didn't love him, or at least not in the way he wanted her to.
Solas must have known that too.
But everyone also knew that Mythal would never love him in such a way, and it seemed to Felassan that perhaps Solas didn't understand that yet.
Though truly it was hard to tell. Solas was so vivid and proud and sparkling, his defensive glitter deflecting pity like a thousand excruciating mirrors. He had the sharpest tongue at court and he never hesitated to use it. Everyone was a little afraid of him. Everyone was a little infatuated with him - except Mythal, apparently, and yet he wanted no one else.
He was indescribable, fascinating, an enigma. Felassan watched him with his frantic activity and his brilliant, effervescent beauty, and wondered if he wasn't just terribly afraid to be alone in his own mind.
------time is jagged (broken) you feel your heart catch on it, how the strands rip and tear
Felassan had no good reason to seek Solas out, but he was curious. He wanted to find out what Solas was behind all his panes of coloured glass - his smugly tilted chin, his unexpected earnestness, and yes, his occasional offhand cruelty.
So he made his way into Solas' circle of acquaintances. He made Solas laugh; he could always do that. Solas' tongue was a little less sharp when it came to him, or so it seemed. Felassan thought he glimpsed a softness in those lilac eyes - or perhaps that was just imagined. Perhaps there was some secret tenderness smudging his judgements into delusion even then.
On the day of the summer festival Mythal danced with Solas until the late afternoon. It was sweltering, the sun beating down from its reddened, lidless eye; everyone wore fine silk and gauze, the air filling with soft peachy wisps of fabric, an undulating mist limned in gold. Solas was barely clothed, and he looked transported, his eyes shut, his eyelids smooth, his features clean and fine. His body was so lithe, so slender. Their dancing was beautiful, but it looked inhuman. It didn't seem to have any softness in it.
Afterwards Mythal stepped away from Solas and spoke into his ear, and because Felassan was watching so carefully he saw it - less than a second, infinitesimal, the way Solas' face lost its light. Then the look was gone, and he smiled, bowed his head. He stood tall as he watched her walk away from him.
The party wound down quickly after that. Some of the courtiers swept out after Mythal. The others apparently saw little reason to be there in her absence.
Solas sat silently in the corner, holding a crystalline glass in his hands, mint-green and elaborately faceted. It was a lovely, carefully-crafted thing. Felassan watched and saw that Solas wasn't drinking. He simply dipped a finger into the fluid and considered quietly as the alcohol evaporated from his skin, like a memory he preferred not to hold on to. He gazed into the vessel as if he were trying to absorb the fumes with his eyes.
Felassan was drinking ice-wine, sweet and cool and ephemeral. He realised suddenly that he was the last person still there, and he stood hastily, putting his glass down. Solas looked up at him.
'Are you leaving?’ Solas asked, and Felassan hesitated. He should have known better. If he stayed he'd only inherit all this pain.
And yet - Solas' voice was so casual but Felassan remembered how he'd cracked open. That almost imperceptible moment of anguish.
‘I don’t know. Am I?’ he said.
‘You don’t have to,’ Solas said; and so of course Felassan stayed.
That night Solas kissed him for the first time, and he tasted of her.
------you could have left, you could have said no (couldn't you?)
There's a memory which can't be real. In the memory they're tumbling through golden clouds, soft and bright, and Solas is laughing, holding Felassan's face in his hands. His eyes are clear, sweet, locked on Felassan's own. There's no pain in them.
But it wasn't like that, not really. Solas was never wholly present in those years. No moment that passed between them was free of pain.
There was a night, a true one, when they went together down to the lake beneath the palace to swim naked beneath the long, whispering fronds of the willows, and the water was so silver with moonlight it was like they were floating through mercury - a glittering, tensile shimmer. Felassan splashed Solas and Solas looked up at him, shocked and indignant, and then he chased him across the lake, stumbling and kicking water into the air in bright diamond spirals, and he was laughing then, almost carefree, almost young.
He tackled Felassan to the ground, and the water was shallow there and they kissed, breathless, floating. Felassan was half kissing and half drowning, swallowing moonlight, holding fiercely on to Solas to keep from being swept away.
But they always had to go back. There were always those nights - the court moving as if with its own rhythm, swaying like an ancient, patient underwater forest, myrrh heavy on the air. Golden statues in the shape of Mythal's vallaslin stood around, branches like the ones that Felassan and Solas themselves bore on their foreheads, the markings that shackled them to the ground.
On those nights Solas dressed in robes of sheer, billowing satin and adorned his ears with loops and chains, little mother-of-pearl baubles, and his eyes were always on Mythal; Felassan watched every moment and saw the way he lit up when she remembered him, the way he fell into a mirrored, diverging silence when she did not.
Sometimes Felassan tried dancing with someone else, kissing someone else - men, women, everyone, anyone he could find. Solas didn't seem to notice. Solas didn't seem to care. Why would he?
By then, Solas had told Felassan that he loved Mythal. He had said that many times.
He'd never said that he loved Felassan, and Felassan assumed that he never would.
------one day you'll see that the pain is still there (it was always there)
Sometimes Mythal would spurn Solas - for days, for weeks. There was always some slight, small or imagined.
And Felassan hated himself for it but his traitorous heart leapt when he saw it happening, when he saw Solas' eyes shutter with that brief, private agony. Because when she turned her face away, when Solas was in the most pain, that was when he'd bring Felassan to his bed.
Solas would fuck him and then, Felassan's sweat still cooling on his skin, he would pace through the room, talking quickly, nonsensically, trying to understand what he'd done, what had made her turn away from him.
'You didn't do anything,' Felassan would tell him, naked in his bed, clutching the linen sheets around him, breathing in their nightshade scent, trying to keep the room's marble chill away. 'It's always something. It would always have been something.'
But Solas didn't seem to hear.
Solas kissed him so urgently on those nights - the force of his breathtaking longing, his desperate, clutching need. But Felassan knew he could not make too much of it. The longing was not for him, not really. He was just a way to forget Mythal's absence.
Felassan wondered if Mythal made Solas feel the way that Solas made him feel. If it hurt the same.
When Mythal finally summoned him back, Solas would lean over to kiss Felassan's cheek in farewell, and his lips were always cool, as if his mind were very far away, as if he were already somewhere else.
------it was real once (wasn't it?) it was real it was real it was real
Felassan remembers one day. The best day, and the worst. He woke in Solas' bed and Solas was still asleep beside him, which was very often not the case. When his eyes opened he was clingy, greedy for touch, nuzzling and smiling until it turned into slow, fumbling sex in the rosy light of the dawn spilling through the long windows. Solas whispered sweet things and he was so uncharacteristically affectionate that Felassan could almost believe that he was truly and entirely in that one place.
Afterwards Solas got out of bed and looked at the list of tasks for the day that he had carefully pinned above his desk, and then he shook his head and tore it up. 'I don't care,' he said, and Felassan looked closely at him but he didn't appear wild-eyed or manic. He looked calm, certain, closer to happy than Felassan had ever seen him.
'Let's go somewhere else,' Solas said, and so they stopped by the kitchens to pile a basket high with figs and soft cheese and honey-cakes, and then they went through the eluvian to a place that Solas knew. This place was special, he told Felassan - he said that no one else had ever been there with him, which meant that Mythal had never been there, and Felassan felt breathless with the thought that maybe it all signified something.
Violets grew in the grotto, the colour of fading bruises, crushed to ephemeral sweetness beneath their passing feet. There were shifting golden lights speckled over the grass and the air tasted of old moss and Felassan lay with his head in Solas' lap, gazing up at the hummingbirds in the air above them. They were iridescent and darting and heartbreakingly small, and as he watched them he felt wings just like that beating inside his own chest. Then Solas conjured some luminescent baubles to please him, and they danced over the grotto with the hummingbirds, drawing glittering green pictures that hovered in the air for a single poignant moment and then faded, losing the light.
Solas tipped his head back, looked at the sky through the layered branches. 'We should go away together,' he said. 'Just the two of us. We could leave it all behind.'
And Felassan should have known better, he should have understood, but he felt hope shining out of him, beaming nakedly from his face as he smiled up at Solas, as he sat up to kiss him, as they tumbled through the grass and tangled themselves together and and kissed for what seemed like hours, sunlit and unhurried, lips and skin dappled with warmth.
When they went back to the palace they were laughing, hand in hand, hurrying up to Solas' rooms. Solas bent to press his lips to Felassan's throat and Felassan could already feel Solas' arms around him, their bodies fitting together, how it would be like a promise this time, how it would seal the dreams into something concrete and real.
But there was a note on Solas' door, and Solas took it down and read it, and his face changed. Settling into the old familiar lines. 'Oh,' he said, and then. 'She needs me. I have to go.'
He let go of Felassan's hand, and the air was cool against his palm. It had happened so many times but it felt worse then; it felt nauseating, humiliating in a way that it had never been before. Felassan couldn't even look at Solas. He swallowed hard and heat rose up in him, flickering cruel and blue against the back of his throat, strangling the words he didn't know how to say.
So he didn't say anything at all. He just turned, his face prickling and burning, and left Solas there. He walked quickly, staring at the ground, trying not to meet anyone's gaze because he felt somehow that they must have all seen, they must all know.
Solas went to Mythal, and Felassan went out of the palace and walked for hours, all night, and he felt very cold and small and he thought that maybe he would never be able to believe in a good thing again.
------it will take years to find all the wounds (and it will be too late to heal them)
Once when Felassan knocked on Solas' door, it took a long time for him to open it. And when he finally did Mythal was there, gazing imperiously over Solas' shoulder. Her eyes rested on Felassan, light and amused, as if he were nothing but some kind of small animal that Solas had procured for her entertainment.
She was naked. Felassan averted his eyes, and yet her nakedness felt like an expression of her power. She watched him coolly, making no attempt to cover herself, entirely without shame. Somehow he was the vulnerable one; somehow being clothed felt like an admission of his weakness before her.
And then - 'Join us,' Mythal said, and her voice was warm and resonant and enveloping and for a moment Felassan could almost understand the way Solas felt about her.
She turned away, but Solas hesitated at the door, and there were purple shadows about his eyes as he gazed at Felassan for a moment of futile, brutal clear-sightedness. 'Fel,' he said. 'You don't have to.' But Felassan knew better. He said nothing. He went inside.
It had felt strange being clothed before his naked goddess but he did not want to be unclothed before her either. Still, he did what was expected of him.
Mythal didn't touch him. She had Solas touch him instead, and that was worse.
Solas' hands were on Felassan and his mouth was on Mythal. Solas touched him and it was the same beloved touch and Felassan felt cold and clammy, desperate. There was a bright, precious innocence slipping from him. He felt something within him dying slowly, drowning there in the light.
He would remember this, the next time. It would always be there. Solas would never touch him again without this moment pressed between them, shedding dry petals and crushed white scents. He would remember the hot, shivering pulse of his shame in his chest; what it made him believe about himself.
Felassan looked up and saw Mythal gazing at him - clear-eyed, amused. As if she knew how it felt. As if it entertained her to impress her will on them both at once, to do this to them together, to make a common scar.
Felassan closed his eyes and imagined every word he knew falling from the ceiling, smothering them, flooding the room in a litter of tangled, twisted sentences. The words would become so thick and snarled and brambled that it wouldn't mean anything any more. It wouldn't be real.
Afterwards Solas lay back, sweat sticking his hair to his forehead. He smiled absently at Felassan. 'Are you all right?' he said.
Felassan nodded without words. Solas' eyes rested on him a moment longer, and then he turned away to hold Mythal in his arms.
Felassan remained beside them at the edge of the bed, taking up as little space as possible. He curled into himself and he lay there gazing silently into the darkness the whole night long.
------you're still there (time is jagged) still broken
Felassan was with Solas when he removed the vallaslin. Solas was pacing around the room, talking quickly, the words tumbling out of him, betrayed and horrified and heartbroken. What she'd done, what she was, as if it all came as some kind of terrible, unbelievable revelation to him.
Felassan had always known what Mythal was. He'd tried to tell Solas, but he could never hear.
Then Solas raised a hand to his forehead, magic billowing around him. He tore the vallaslin out of himself and it emerged from his body in a cloud of furious black, roiling and eviscerating, and he retched and bent over, gasping, the black seeping out of him as if he were vomiting some coruscating toxin.
He slumped to the floor, shaking, and Felassan thought maybe he was crying, but when he took his hands away from his face there was nothing but blood from the place he'd torn his flesh open.
Felassan was frightened. He knelt beside Solas, tried to look into his face. 'I love you,' he said, for the first time.
'I hate her,' Solas said, and Felassan told himself he hadn't heard.
------you learned suffering in those years (you're always there)
After that they did go away together, though part of Felassan was still waiting for Mythal to call Solas back. He couldn't trust it. He knew this was real but it couldn't possibly be the kind of real that would last.
And yet - in the mountains, in the Lighthouse, things felt different. For a while, at least, they felt different. 'Fel - ' Solas' arms around him, Solas' mouth pressed to the column of his throat, his voice urgent, breaking, his eyelashes spangled with tears. 'I love you. I'm sorry.'
It had never been like that before. Solas' eyes were wide, trembling. 'Please,' he said, 'please,' and Felassan didn't even know what he was begging for but it didn't matter, he'd give anything, everything, he'd do whatever Solas wanted if he would just keep looking at him like that.
'I'm sorry.' Solas seemed afraid, panicked, as if Felassan might leave him too. 'I love you, I love you,' he said over and over again, scraped and shivering, and then they kissed, messy and clumsy and grasping, kissing as if they were trying to consume each other, scrabbling to get inside one another's skin.
Felassan cradled Solas' head and he fit their bodies together, thrust deep within Solas, and time's passage broke open, stalled, here in this place, what he'd always wanted - and for a moment it really was everything he'd wanted, it was all-encompassing, it was enough.
Solas tipped his head back, a hoarse cry slipping from his throat. Solas gazed up at Felassan as if he saw him, as if there was no one else there at all. Solas gasped his name and Felassan felt so powerful then. He could take Solas away from it all. He could take him apart, make him forget everything but the two of them, as if it had always been the two of them, as if their love had always been simple and clean and everlasting.
Felassan held him, shuddering, urgent, and he tried not to remember that Solas had never loved him like this when he had someone else to love.
------you're far away now, you're safe (aren't you?)
Solas led the rebellion all that time and he was so tall and strong and proud when he commanded their armies - and yet, when they were alone, he was so quiet and humble and grateful. His eyes tracing over Felassan's body as if he still couldn't believe what had passed between them, as if he were still waiting for Felassan to start hurting him too. The peaceful nights, limbs entwined, cheeks pressed together. Solas' auburn hair splayed over the pillow, strands tangling with Felassan's own.
For Felassan, Solas painted the chamber that they shared with birds, every type of bird known to Thedas. The paintings were so lifelike that it was as if Felassan could hear their song through some inner ear - a brilliant, beautiful aviary. He had always loved birds. Solas said he had always loved that about him.
'I'm sorry,' Solas said again, after he finished painting. He was always apologizing. 'I don't deserve you. I don't deserve this.'
Felassan felt wings brushing about him, soft, feathered, eternal. Too bright for this place, too gentle. 'You do,' he said.
Solas' lips trembled over his jaw, breath hot and damp and penitent. 'I hurt you,' he said. 'I know I did.'
'No you didn't,' Felassan said, because he couldn't speak the truth any more. He'd trained himself out of it, in those terrible years at Mythal's court.
But every time Solas said I love you Felassan remembered how long he'd waited and yes, it did hurt. It still hurt. It always would.
------you'll wonder, again and again, what you can do to free yourself (nothing)
Once, they met on the battlefield. Mythal's silverite armor was set with shards of bright-edged obsidian, all so polished and gleaming that it was hard to look at her. She was taller than Felassan had remembered, striding through the armoured masses, her hands raised to pour forth pulses of shimmering, vitreous magic that oscillated through the ranks of the rebellion, shattered shields like globes of brittle glass, striking countless elves to the ground. Her dark hair whipped about her and it made Felassan think of the way the vallaslin had looked when Solas ripped it out of himself, a guttering sable poison that he couldn't clear from his lungs.
She walked toward Solas, raising a hand so the soldiers in the way were battered back by the sheer force of her invisible, ineffable power. Solas met her gaze, his chin held high, but Felassan saw how he trembled. Saw how his hands stalled in the air, how his magic froze to icicles all around him, fell uselessly to the ground. Driving a thousand tiny gashes into it.
For a moment he feared that Solas would simply yield to her, surrender himself, surrender them all.
Mythal stood before him and whispered; Felassan would never know what she had said. Solas did not surrender. But he was frozen, arrested, sure as if she'd taken his chin in her hand, thrust her fingers into his mouth, dragging blood and saliva across his jaw.
Soldiers died right there in the dirt beside him, because she looked at him and he couldn't see anything else.
Some of them were Felassan's friends. He buried them afterwards, alone, while Solas paced and schemed and cursed uselessly at the sky. He buried his friends and carved their names into the stones with his own feeble, exhausted magic and didn't know, any longer, where his rage belonged.
------even in the deepest intimacy you hear that soft voice telling you what you're worth (nothing)
When Mythal died, Felassan thought Solas might die too. They were so interwoven, even then. It was hard to imagine one going on without the other.
But Solas held Felassan in his arms that night, and Solas was weeping, kissing him all over, his forehead, his jaw, the hollow of his throat. He tasted like salt. Sometimes he still tasted like her. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I'm sorry,' and Felassan didn't know who he was apologizing to, who the tears were for.
It seemed impossible that Solas would sleep but eventually the exhaustion took him, and Felassan held him, stroking his hair like a child, whispering pointless comfort into the nape of his neck. Felassan held him close and traced the arcing curve of his ribs, which seemed in that moment so slim and brittle, and he gazed into the darkness and knew, even then, that it was too late.
Neither of them had stood on this shore before, but there at last, as the years pooled about their ankles, they had reached the limits of their love.
Because it was love, Felassan thought - stubborn, defiant. He had to believe that. It was love. Solas had loved him.
Just not enough.
She was dead and he was still choosing her.
------like looking at the sun through a spring leaf (green-golden) so the facets go transparent, and all you can see are the bones.
Sometimes when Briala talks about Celene, Felassan's chest seizes with an agony he should have grown out of centuries ago.
He'd like to tell Briala to save herself before it's too late; he wants to beg her to let Celene go. But he tried for so long - on Solas, on himself. And on others who he's known through the centuries. He's grown fatalistic about love, or whatever this is. He knows now that it will take its course come what may, leaving devastation in its wake. Nothing that he could possibly do will stop it.
Still - at the last moment, something stays his hand. A memory of Solas? Or himself? There's no knowing. Even now he's afraid to enter into too much self-analysis.
He does not take the key from her. He lets her go.
And then he sits before the fire, breathing in its sappy green scent, the smell of new growth and ashes. He closes his eyes. He doesn't have the secret he was sent to retrieve; he can't give Solas what he needs.
Solas will kill him, Felassan thinks. It's quiet, dull. He doesn't care. It doesn't matter.
He died already, some night in Arlathan long ago. He just didn't know it until now.
------he dies by your hand and time winds around itself (fragments and discordances) she's gone but you are not free (you will never be free)