(written without much editing, what even are ages, I make everything up, halp)

It's like a prick of starlight in his head. Clear as a high note. Bloody weeks pass, sleepless nights roll on and on, breathless hours, minutes, seconds pass, everyday, but on bright mornings, lying in sticky sheets, watching dust motes in the sun, he thinks upon one single moment above all the others. Most people can't point out when they fall in love with someone, and he agrees—he doesn't know the answer. He gnashes that in his brain like gristle—fall in love. Maker, no. The words just come so easily! They shouldn't.

But when he thinks of Aeri Lavellan, so much rises inside his chest, he's thankful for this singular clarity. Something he can hold onto when she leaves on expeditions that don't promise a return. Something to straighten him out. There's no way she feels this way, too. There is no way.

He remembers a conversation in the gardens. He remembers the sun, her strange laughter, and her hand, touching him once.

—

Aeri Lavellan was a deeply quiet woman, uncomfortable with her rank.

"Well, you know how the Dalish are," Sera had said in passing to him one day, though Cullen suspected she didn't know anything about "how the Dalish are". "Serious as the Maker's own mother, I'll bet."

Aeri didn't sleep in her bed, it was said. She slept on the balcony, with a thin blanket and a single pillow. She didn't speak much except to give soft orders or inquire about someone's health. She met with her advisors in the gardens, if she could, and often just to listen and nod, deliver a decision, and dismiss them with a slight bow. But he understood this. He understood this so much, it scared him. Didn't the others see how she was trying?

He honored her fight to retain some semblance of herself even when everything she knew was gone. He wanted her to know that, somehow—an urge that drove him in a half-run when he had been called to the gardens that day.

The autumn sun was high, the sky a thorough blue. The garden was not much yet—mostly dead things still.

She was sitting on a stone bench, back curled in a C shape, over something he couldn't see. He approached from the side, intent not to startle her. She was weaving flower stems between her thin, white fingers. Orange auburn hair fell out of her unkempt braid, as usual, and she kept blowing air between her lips to move it out of her eyes.

He forgot to announce himself. He only realized this because she turned to face him first. Her brown eyes and freckles glowed in the autumn sun.

"Ah! My lady," he said, bowing at once. "My apologies. I—"

He did not know what he was apologizing for.

"No," she said. "There's no need."

Her eyes darted from his face to the air beside him and back. She didn't seem to know why he was apologizing either. It made something in his stomach jump high into his chest.

The silence lasted another moment. He knew he should have been asking why she'd requested his presence, but she didn't speak either. He felt as if the whole garden was watching them. Every dead leaf and insect and twig.

"May I sit?" he asked. He didn't know why.

"Yes," she said. She looked away as he sat, as if she didn't know why she agreed. She looked down at the rope of flower stems in her hands. She rubbed it between her fingers, the tips of her nails stained with green. She had found life here, somehow, in this dead place.

"It is an old habit," she said, so softly he almost missed it. A breeze blew on the back of his neck. He felt cold, even in the afternoon sun.

"I certainly understand," he said. Did he sound too desperate? He cleared his throat. He put his hands on his knees to stop his foot from tapping. He realized his legs were shaking.

She turned toward him, languid, watching him through pieces of hair. Her forehead gleaned from the warmth. He felt suddenly like he had said a very wrong thing.

"How old are you, General?" she asked.

"33 years."

"And many of those in service to your Chantry," she said, as if reading down a list. Surprisingly non-accusatory, for all the right she had.

"It is…all that I remember."

He watched the corners of her pink lips turn up in a small smile. It didn't reach her eyes.

"And you had no family of your own?"

"It was not allowed, my lady."

She nodded suddenly. It was, he realized, a smile of sad understanding.

"I am 25 years," she said. "I believe the Dalish calendar year is remarkably similar to your shemlen one."

The question tumbles out of his mouth before he can stop it. "Were you allowed a family within your clan?"

He expected stone and emptiness from her face.

But how wrong! Oh, her face. He remembers it, always—the way her face broke open like a crack in an ancient, white façade. How her teeth flashed, throwing her freckles into radiant spots of light as her smile wrinkled the skin around her eyes.

"This is one of the great jokes of the Lavellan clan," she said. She stared into his face directly as she spoke. "How many of the Arlathvhen must we attend until the First decides to get married!"

She was golden as evening light, bright and old and young at once. He smiled wildly, even if he didn't quite understand the joke, because she smiled at him, right into his eyes. He could feel her warmth spread into his mouth and nose and eyes, down into his chest. A yawning wholeness.

She turned away. Ephemeral as twilight.

"But no," she said softly. "Oh. I was allowed. Yes. But I felt too much like anyone's mother."

It was the first time he heard her speak of her clan without the heaviness of grief. It was as if she'd suddenly forgotten.

But the grief was never far. Her face turned into splotches as she looked down at her lap. Her fingers squeezed the stems until they flattened into green goo.

He felt on the edge of a cliff. Too see that golden face again!

"You can't escape large children, unfortunately," he said. "Our companions are truth of that."

And then, her laugh. A single, barking laugh, pulled roughly out from her lungs. Her eyes widened in surprise from it. She put a hand to her face, and laughed then because of that.

He started laughing then too, partly out of sheer relief.

"Large children," she repeated softly, as if to herself, laughing again hearing it out of her own mouth. "Yes."

She suddenly reached out to touch him on the upper arm, just beyond the reach of his pauldrons. Ice spread in tendrils through his blood from where her palm rested and where her fingers touched. "They are silly, aren't they?" she said. "But we must keep them safe."

The way he looked to his face, he would have promised her anything.

"Yes, my lady," he said. "We will do that."

But her hand, just as suddenly as it came, jerked away from him. An even deeper red crept under her freckles. She nodded in dismissal, as she usually did.

"Thank you, Ser Cullen."

But this time, she was the one who walked away.

—

He never learned why she had called him there.

But he went to sleep dreaming of her laughing that night, laughing laughing laughing, as she ran between the trees at the break of evening light.

He wonders what she remembers of him.