Title: Ordinary Enchantment
Summary: Sometimes, it doesn't take magic to begin healing even the deepest wounds. Then again, there are all kinds of magic. Featured characters are Danica Amell and Alistair.
Author's Notes: This one-shot is directly related to Funeral for a Friend, which you may want to read in order to see the meaning behind this piece. Both pieces are set in the world of Through the Blackest Nights.
He wonders as he walks this vaguely familiar corridor what his court must be thinking. Perhaps he had been a bit hasty in declaring court suspended for two days, after learning that she would return on the morrow. But he can't bring himself to care what their opinions are, even if he didn't have a clue what to expect when she arrived. It wasn't as if he exercised his privilege very often, anyway.
He doesn't like to think that she might forget what happened before she left, or that she might decide in her time away that this isn't what she wants.
"It's only for a few weeks," she says, avoiding his eyes for the first time since he's known her.
"Doesn't mean I shouldn't wish you a safe trip, or take the time to give you a proper farewell." He knows she's put off this trip as long as she could, watching as the letters from the Circle asking for a visit from their liaison grew ever more insistent until there was no longer any amount of maneuvering that would avoid her call to return home.
He's kept her company for long enough now that he doesn't miss the look that passes across her face. She doesn't want to go. He's not sure why she wouldn't want to catch up with those she knew, see familiar faces. Wynne had always told him the Circle was a better home than mages could find in the world outside, but…
With experience on the throne behind him, with the startling resemblance of her expression now to the one Wynne always wore when speaking of the Circle, he sees something new. He's learned to see unpleasant truths hidden away under half-smiles and brittle platitudes. And he's learned how to speak to them, without ever speaking of them; that's how the game is played.
He takes her hand, that in itself being almost more contact than they've ever before shared. He tilts her chin up with a finger, leaning down before he loses his nerve to grace her lips with a soft kiss.
"There," he tells her, reaching into his memory for the small and private joke she sparked in her determination to shake out some of the weight he carried. "A promise you can take with you, that you'll come back when your liaisoning is done. I need you here."
He thinks he's done the right thing, later, watching from his office window as the caravan begins its slow progression out of the castle courtyard, when he sees her lift a hand to her lips to keep his promise close.
He's not sure why he feels such a thrill in stepping into these chambers, even as he notices how sparsely they're decorated. Amazing. She's lived here for nearly two years, but doesn't permit herself any of the luxuries of her surroundings. He had a perfectly legitimate reason for coming here, having given his word to one of the councilors that he would see what he could find in her notes about the practical application of military magic during times of peace before the court holiday began.
But he can admit to himself, now he's here, that he'd have found an excuse to stand in her rooms long before if he'd known how close to her he'd feel.
He finds no papers in her desk, but in the bottom drawer, lodged loosely in the back, he does find a small velvet sack. He thinks that might be the source of the rattling he heard, that sound like broken glass, when the drawer settled after he'd opened it.
Gently, he spills the contents out onto her desk, recognizing from his travels through the Brecilian Forest the pieces of what was meant to be a halla. An odd little treasure, for one who had spent most of her life surrounded by stone and water, and from the lines on the larger pieces it appears that it had been repaired once before.
He thinks of the stories she's pulled out of him, the burdens he wouldn't have wished on anyone else.
He thinks of how deftly she's evaded his attempts to return the favor, turning the conversation back to him.
Seeing the shattered pieces of this strange memento, he thinks he was right after all. He thinks of the woman who would hold on to something like this, who had so effortlessly drawn him out of himself, teasing with a smile and taunting that he couldn't spend all his time kinging.
He thinks of the woman who had held him, on the anniversary of the end of a war, who had voiced her admiration for his ability to weep openly over the loss of the closest thing he'd ever had to a brother.
He thinks she couldn't truly be as hard as the image she presented so well.
He can't believe what he's hearing. They had let this man out of the cells that kept him, locked away in the basement of the late Arl Howe's estate, and permitted him to reclaim his title. It had seemed right. With the pain of Howe's treachery once again evident on Aedan's face, it had been natural to believe that Howe would banish to his dungeons a political rival, even without knowing the man would eventually lend his voice to the Wardens in the Landsmeet.
But here Arl Vaughan stands, chained once more at the behest of the sergeant who'd brought him here. And there before him is the newly uplifted Bann Valendrian, beseeching him to grant the King's Justice to more than a dozen elven women who had been tortured or violated or killed by the accused, before and after the Blight, his crimes having resumed after his release from Howe's twisted grasp.
When asked to offer a defense, the Arl instead rests his leering eyes upon the recently confirmed liaison from the Circle of Magi and fills the room with obscenities and ravings about this diminutive woman looking rather elf-like herself.
No, he definitely can't believe what he's hearing. And for this to be the first court she's attended, after years of study in a tower in the middle of nowhere, after having seen nothing of the world at large, he fears what her reaction might be.
He is momentarily stunned when she simply dismisses him with an upturned lip and a level gaze.
He wonders what to think of the fiery approval that settles across her face as he speaks the sentence that condemns his noble to death.
He wakes, hearing his name, scrambling up from the desk where he'd fallen asleep. Morning light streams in through the windows, and she's standing there, voicing her confusion at finding him here in her rooms. As he stands, he quickly scoops up the figurine and shifts the pot of glue to conceal both behind his back.
"I didn't expect a royal welcome. At least not until I finished scrubbing off the dirt of the road, at any rate." She smiles, but under the taunting sarcasm he can hear the echoes of the sentiment he had seen the day she left.
"Oh, I came in to find your notes on… I guess that doesn't matter. I had almost gone to the Market District, to try to find something I could give you to show you that I… missed you, while you were away. And then I found… Well."
She freezes in place when he draws his hand out from behind his back and offers her the ceramic halla, whole again for all its cracks. He thinks he might have been wrong, now, when he sees her eyes fill and finds himself wishing he wasn't right about her not being so hard after all.
But then she drops her things on the floor and crosses to him. She takes her treasure from him, and somehow remembers to return the kiss he had given her almost a month before, before she finally breaks and allows him to hold on to her.
He listens to the story of the halla, one so very different than the Dalish had told him when he'd found them during the Blight. His mind fills the gaps in her words, and as he understands the extent of what had been hidden behind her wit and Wynne's kindness, it takes everything he has not to break with her.
She mumbles something now, unsure of herself, unkind to herself, lamenting that she didn't know a gift might be the right thing for her return and fumbling through an admission that she can't ever see giving him anything as great as this.
He wishes he knew how to tell her she already has.