I don't own Dragon Age, and I don't speak French fluently.
"Sister Nightingale! Sister Nightingale?"
Leliana turned on her heel, a soft sigh of irritation breezing through her lips. Maker, if nobody could give her a moment - to breathe, to think, to eat, to sleep. Sleep, there was something she hadn't done in a while. Oh, the thought of her warm bed, with soft blankets to snuggle up in and a downy pillow or two...the beautiful idea made Leliana's eyes flutter -
"Sister Nightingale?"
The Chantry sister's wizened face swam vaguely into Leliana's line of vision, and Leliana staggered back a step, blinking rapidly to keep herself fully alert and conscious. (No more thinking about sleep for you.)
"May I help you, Sister?" she managed to ask. "Does the Chantry require something?"
(A chantry sister. Leliana remembered back when she would have answered to that title. That was nigh upon ten years ago, wasn't it? Back in Lothering, the small town nobody cared much about, with its simplistic ways and its secluded, safe chantry. Just Sister. That's what she was then, never Sister Nightingale. Now, things were quite different, a far cry from what things had been once.)
"...?" the Chantry sister finished. Leliana blinked twice and then sighed in self exasperation. She had distracted herself once again, going off on tangents within the span of her own mind. Cassandra was always harping on her about that, calling her a scatterbrain - (No, Leliana, pay attention.)
"I an sorry," she apologized, her cheeks warming slightly with embarassment. "Could you please repeat that? My mind seems to be everywhere but where it is supposed to be this evening."
The sister smiled, a tight lipped, failure of an attempt at sympathy.
"Of course. The children, the ones that Inquisitor Lavellan saved from the village near Val Royeaux, the village that was ravaged by demons...they are staying here in the keep until further notice, and they are spooked by the thunder..."
(Thunder? Leliana hadn't even realized it was raining. Her eyes flickered to the left so she could see the window, and she flinched at the sudden flare of nearly blue lightning. A clap of earshattering thunder followed soon after, and Leliana couldn't help being reminded of the fight against another set of demons, and how there had been such similar sounds.)
"...and they've requested that you tell them a story," the sister finished, nervously twirling a strand of hair that must have been blonde in better days, but now shone a feeble silver in the candlelight of the corridor.
Leliana could feel her eyebrows shoot up high on her forehead. She hadn't heard herself associated with stories in a long time. This thought made her stomach twist a little.
"They want me to tell them a story?" Leliana repeated slowly, mulling over the words that had once been familiar. (She remembered the last time someone had been particularly inquisitive about the tales she had to tell, and it had been almost a whole decade ago.) The sister nodded.
"I have not told stories to anyone in so long," Leliana said absently, chewing on her bottom lip. She regretted that fact every day, that she had let the magical spell of words and music fall to the bottom of her priorities, but what other choice did she have? She had been too busy for everything since day one of picking up the proverbial gauntlet belonging to the Left Hand of the Divine.
(That was a pun, wasn't it? Left Hand, gauntlet...a faint smile touched her lips. She would have appreciated that. The Warden. Her Warden. She wouldn't ever have let anyone save Leliana know, but she would have laughed. The bard-turned-spymaster's smile left as suddenly as it had appeared. Leliana wished that she could hear her laugh again. It didn't have to be a big laugh, not a full belly belt. Maybe just a little chuckle, or Maker help her, a giggle. Any of them would do, if only she could hear it again. No, no, no. The last time she had heard it was nearly eight years ago, and there was no possible way for her to hear it again. Leliana needed to stop pining for it. Get a grip on yourself.)
"The children have been staying in the chapel, and they happened across an old archive entry - your retelling of Andraste's life," the sister explained, her weak hazel eyes watching Leliana carefully, like a mouse waiting for a cat to pounce. Leliana's eyebrows rose again in surprise.
"They...saw that?" she asked. "They must have quite good eyes, to find something so old." She paused. "And they enjoyed it?"
(She remembered how much the revered Mother Superior had hated it, how she had declared it the work of a lyrium-addled little girl and how she resented Leliana's right to add it to the archives.)
"Oh, yes, Sister Nightingale," the sister said, her voice growing less nervous and more enthusiastic. "They loved it. The elder children read it to the smaller ones, over and over for hours on end. They were talking about it to anyone who would listen, about how Andraste was the bravest hero in the world and how they wished they had heard your story instead of their own Priestess' sermon." She chuckled. "They demanded to know who had penned it, and although we tried to hold them off - we knew you were terribly busy - they wheedled it out of us eventually and begged for another tale."
Leliana could feel her face glowing with the secondhand flattery, and she repressed the urge to giggle. She was relatively positive Cassandra had banned her from giggling.
"I am glad that something I did could bring them some happiness, especially since things have been so terrible for them," she replied, smiling slightly. The sister, seemingly emboldened by the positive reactions she was drawing from the Left Hand, continued.
"I know you are quite busy, Sister Nightingale, but they were so eager to hear more, and along with everything they have been through, the storm is just another thing to terrify them..."
Leliana hesitated. "I..."
She really did have a lot of work to do, the paper kind mostly - she had to approve and investigate each member of those arriving for the Dalish light festival the Inquisitor seemed quite insistent on having, she had to answer a whole mountain of letters, she had to sift through stacks of information on everyone even remotely involved in the Inquisition task forces. Not to mention the impeding meeting between the Divine and the Antivan royalty, which she would have to sit in on and observe in total secrecy...
"I will come."
~O~
The chapel, Leliana thought, was excellent at making sure the thunder and lightning presented itself in the most fearsome way.
The long windows cast dreary shadows across the cold stone floor, and through the clear, obviously thin glass, the storm made itself obscenely visible with its swollen clouds. Flashes of lighting, bright white and ice blue, streaked in jagged branches through the dark night alongside the infected violet-green-black clouds, which let loose with torrents of rain. The rain pounded an intense, hard beat against the panes, and the howling gusts of wind shrieked a harpy melody along with it. Leliana thought it was something out of a story told late at night to frighten young children, and it seemed to be doing the job quite well, judging from the cluster of shivering youths huddled near the fireplace.
"Children, I have brought someone for you," the sister announced. The orphaned children's eyes, wide and fearful in the dim glow of the firelight, all darted from the sister to Leliana. One of them pushed to her feet, a scraggly looking girl who couldn't have been a day older than eight - yet she stood tall, inspecting Leliana curiously through a curtain of shaggy brown curls. A flash of lightning illuminated a slightly stained bandage that encircled the left side of her head, covering her eye and cheek. Leliana's stomach lurched.
"Is that Sister Leliana?" she inquired, her speech lilting pleasantly with the melodic accent of Orlais as she shoved her hair out of her face.
"Leliana wrote story?" a boy piped up.
"That would be Sister Nightingale to you two, be respectful," the sister chastised. "Yes, she wrote the story you all love so much."
"Sister Leliana is quite all right, they are only children," Leliana assured the matronly woman, instinctively wishing to take a step closer to the clearly quite frail children. "I have been told that you all wish for me to tell you another story?"
Each and every one of the children's gaunt, trauma-scarred faces lit up, their miniaturized features curving upwards with the gleaming prospect of a new tale told to them by someone who had made their first few days alone in the world a bit more pleasant through words alone.
"Yes, yes, please, Madame!" they chorused. Two of the children - little boys, brothers perhaps, judging from their identical freckles and carrot colored hair - leapt up off of the floor and tugged a chair closer to the fire, looking at the bard expectantly.
Leliana giggled (Cassandra would probably have lectured her for a good hour on putting up a professional front, had she been there as witness), her lips curving upwards so very easily at the adorable antics of the brothers.
"Of course I will tell you another story," she said, picking her way through the parting sea of children as she made her way across the floor to the chair by the fire. As she sat down, the children shifted to gather in front of the chair like a fan, and there Leliana surmised that there was no less than twelve children there, all with at least one injury in varying states of recovery. Although some of them seemed to have hit the growing age and were rather gangly, their faces betrayed that the eldest was in no way older than thirteen or fourteen, and Leliana's heart both swelled and shattered like hot glass in snow. All they had been through, all of them so young...
One of the smallest children, a tiny blond wisp of a girl with an awful red burn scorched across her porcelain cheeks stood, the top of her head barely reaching over those of the children still seated. She cradled something small and dark to her chest, and when she spoke, her voice cracked and rasped in a tone more serious than a priestess reading someone their burial rights.
"Do you like mice?" she asked, her voice heavily accented yet quite clear and deliberate, as if she had been working out the sentence in her head for more than a few moments. Leliana felt the sudden and intense need to hug the little girl and keep her close so that whatever had dared to harm her so savagely, whatever had caused the constant fear in the child's bright green eyes, would never get near enough to touch her again. (She could practically hear Morrigan mocking her for the sudden surge of motherly instincts.)
"Yes, I do like mice," Leliana assured, leaning forward slightly. "Does he have a name?"
The little girl nodded slowly, looking
down at the small creature cupped in her hands, and then announced, "He said his mother says not to say it to strangers, but later he might be allowed to tell you when you aren't so stranger."
Leliana nodded in understanding.
"Well, he has a very wise mother, then."
The little girl mustered up a broad, close lipped grin, and held the mouse slightly less close to her chest. The creature poked its slim nose into the fire-warmed air and observed Leliana with oddly large, topaz eyes. Moments later it ducked back down into the protection of the child's hands.
"Madame?"
Leliana's attention leapt to another girl, one who was a few years older and whose eyes shone almost purple in the firelight.
"Perdonnez-moi," she said, her forehead wrinkling, "Can...we...story? Sil vous plait?"
Leliana nodded, clasping her gloved hands together.
"Yes, of course. What sort of story would you all like to hear?"
"Princess!" someone exclaimed. "Pretty pretty princess!"
Leliana laughed, having located and identified the speaker to be the inquisitive little boy the Chantry sister had chastised earlier for asking a question.
"A beautiful princess? That can certainly be arranged."
"Can there be a noble hero, as well, please? Like a chevalier?" one of the elder girls asked, her eyes sparking with amber excitement. Leliana's forehead wrinkled at the thought of 'noble' and 'hero' being associated with a chevalier - at least, any that she had known in her time. The girl's pretty face grew worried.
"I am sorry, Madame, I did not mean...we can go without a chevalier - I mean to say, hero -" she said, her voice thick with apology and guilt. Leliana shook her head, forcing the wrinkles of less pleasant thoughts away from her features. Cassandra would be livid to hear that a little girl had been the thing to fell Leliana's already fragile and broken-in-places walls of professionalism.
"Non, non, ne vous inquiétez pas, do not worry," she replied, and like Leliana had surmised, the assurance issued in the girl's first tongue did much more to appease the worried creases on her young face. "You shall have your hero, and they shall be the most noble of them all!"
The child's face cleared up slightly, although it seemed a little pinched still.
"I have an idea," an older boy announced, and like fireflies to a light, all of the children stopped any whispering they might have been partaking in and turned to pay attention. Leliana sat back, resting her elbows on the cushioned arms of the chair.
"And what is that?" she asked. The boy, one of the elder ones no doubt, looked Leliana dead on in the eyes, blue against brown, and smiled cockily.
"I want a lot of fighting, and glory, and magic," he said, every syllable accented only faintly and issued in the most challenging voice Leliana had heard in years. "And I also want..." He scrunched up his sharp, pointed nose in confusion. "How do you say it...a...twist of structure?"
Leliana chuckled. "A plot twist, you mean? I think that would be interesting. I shall see what I can do."
She sat for a moment, simply looking at the children, who had all but forgotten the still-raging storm at their backs, whose eyes (or eye) were trained on her eagerly and steadily, all in the hopes of gilded words that would settle properly in their hearts.
"Once upon a time," she began, "in the depths of the Korcari Wilds..."
(If you want me to continue this, just let me know - I was going to leave it like this, and will do so unless there seems to be a general desire for me to continue.)