There was thunder in the way she stormed into the prison. She had lightning in her eyes, and there was a trail of flame that flickered and died as she passed him. She didn't see him. Her focus was on the man in the farthest cell.
He watched down the hallway as she first stood as far away as she could, threw her fist into the stone bricks. She rallied herself and turned to him. There was no way to hear the questions he was asking, only the muddled echoes of their voices. First he grew louder, and then she did.
The words he did catch made his heart clench. "Why did you lie to me?"
He was intruding, as much as her wrath was not for him, this was a private matter. Something made him step back around to the warden's desk.
He knew that she had spent time with the Warden before. As he hid himself back behind the desk—a position he was more and more familiar with and less and less comfortable with—he heard her footsteps echoing down the aisle back towards me. He jumped around the desk to stop her—ducked back to grab the folio from our spymaster—
"I have Leliana's report on Thom Ranier—"
She took two or three more steps as if hoping she might have been missed her if she kept walking. As she took the papers and tried to read them, he saw her hands were shaking. She stood there a moment longer than he'd ever seen her still. "Can you summarize it?"
Her voice was off. Too soft. He stepped closer, gave her the details that he had, finished, and she still didn't move. He was used to seeing her as a flurry of activity; she was the force that had taken the Inquisition from a plan of Cassandra's, a pet project of the other advisors, into a walking breathing force. She had blazoned the insignia of everyone's chests. She had thrown it onto the walls. She had begun politicking in their name. She had conquered and dealt and built a reputation for them all.
And now she couldn't make a move.
He took the papers, sat them back on the warden's emptied desk. Her hands were clammy as he bundled them together. It was a strangely more intimate position than he'd intended—they were technically in public, but with his gloves sitting on that desk with his mantle and the papers, he could feel the callouses of her fingers, rough along palms and thumbs; roughness mirroring his own hands.
"I'm sorry." He wasn't sure what exactly for; just that she felt this way. "I know…"
"The fictions are what…" she couldn't finish. He realized with a jolt of adrenaline that there were tears sitting unshed in her eyes. He stepped closer, trying to prepare whatever words he had that would make this better. But words had never been his strong suit.
"I... can imagine what he must have meant to you." She was shaking her head. She was shaking her head, and she pulled one of her hands from his. Her fingers were brushing over his mouth.
"Stop." Her head still shook; chin tilting slightly from side to side. "This changes nothing between you and I, Cullen. I need you to know that."
Could she mean that? Could she even know that? Perhaps she only meant that she wanted nothing to change, but something like this could not help but have far reaching effects.
"This just confirms what I thought I knew—that I could't trust him with my—with this." He could accept that. He could accept what she wasn't able to say. They had only been seeing each other a few months.
In practice, it had only been a few weeks, between his outings to the various scouting holds and other expeditions, and her constant trek across Thedas. There had been a week at Skyhold where they had both scandalously shirked their duties and arranged to slip back to the war room separately from each other—still quite late—only to ignore rather pointed looks from both Leliana and Josephine. There had been a week a month or two later when Leliana had very pointedly sent them both to Caer Bronach after it had been captured. The keep had already been secured between his and the Herald's own efforts, and the three squads he had sent himself to man patrols and clean up the hillsides… meant there had been little for them to do… So they had found other things to do.
"What can we do?" He asked, softly.
"Blackwall—Ranier has accepted his fate. But you don't have to. We can have him released to the Inquisition so that you may pass judgment on him yourself."
"I'm not sure that I want to pass judgment." She was chewing on the bottom corner of her lip. "Who am I to judge?"
"Who are any of us?" He asked back. Those old chantry teachings were whispering in the back of his mind.
"True. But this feels like he's giving up. He doesn't think he deserves to redeem himself. And I think he's already come so far to redemption." Her dark eyes finally lifted higher than the collar of his plate mail. "We can't let him stop, can we?"
"As long as he's willing to do what's right." He tried particularly hard to stress that one word. Not just want needed to be done, but what was right. It was something he had not always seen clearly enough to differentiate.
"What would you do if it were you? In this situation?" She asked. "Passing judgment and seeing right from wrong has never seemed so…" She pursed her lips, shook her head.
"Grey?" He supplied.
"Yes." She laughed mirthlessly. He sighed. He realized his fingers were slightly further under her mail tunic than would be proper. He removed them.
"What he did to the men under his command was unacceptable. He betrayed their trust, and betrayed ours. I cannot help but despise him for it. But at the same time, he fought for us as a Warden. Joined the Inquisition, spent his blood for us. We cannot easily abandon this man."
"There's no easy answer." Now she slipped her hands into the seams of his gauntlets.
She pulled him closer and wrapper her arms around him. "Nor should there be. If a choice seems easy, we make it without considering the consequences." He pressed a chaste kiss against her temple.
"What do you want me to tell them?" He asked, pushing her to action.
She took a deep breath. She visibly straightened herself. "Get him out." She ordered. Command suited her, and with a smile he kissed her again. "Leliana said she had a plan?" He nodded. "Make it happen. Let's take care of this." They turned to leave the gaol together, side by side, and she slipped her arm into his.
"We may not be able to find the right answer, but I think we can build a compromise." The smile she slipped up at him seemed genuine, and he would his bare fingers between her own.