AN - This is an angst fest. And also probably the most self-indulgent thing I have ever written in an attempt to make something NOT hurt. I think I may have just made it hurt even more.
READER BE WARNED: There are heavily veiled references about who and what Solas really is throughout. So if you don't know and don't want it spoiled, beware!
Always & Again
I will wait,
I am waiting,
and I will love you
with all the love I possess
until this body
is ash
and I begin my search
for you
again.
- Tyler Knott Gregson
She wore a face that she had no right to wear, and it wrenched something inside of him to see it like this. Contorted into a mask of pain, scratched and dirty, sweat beading on her brow. But blessedly, it was bare, no Vallaslin marked her. She must have been an outsider, even among her clan – or had she joined them from the city? Given the callouses on her hands that spoke to years of hard training, he doubted it. Why would she risk the stigma of remaining a "child"?
Was it even possible that she remembered?
… Did he dare even hope that she remembered?
He had been studying the anchor for days, trying to understand how it came to pass that it had been given to her of all people. Why was she always destined to be thrust into his life time and time again? Was it just some cruel joke that fate played on them? Each time brought together by something bigger than themselves, each time they loved each other more than he deserved.
And each time, he watched her die just as she was surely dying before him now. He couldn't let that happen, not after he had just found her again after all these lifetimes. But the anchor was persistent, trying its level best to consume her and for all his arcane knowledge, the only thing he had been able to do was slow it down. Perhaps if she interacted with one of the rifts, the anchor would take some of its magic back into itself and stabilize.
Solas looked from her hand to her face, his heart aching. He knew it was a terribly self-indulgent thing for him to do, but his hand seemed to move without his conscious consent, reaching out to brush his thumb along the angle of her cheekbone, almost reverently. "Where have you been hiding from me, ma vhenan?"
Oh, how he had searched for her when he had woken, both the Fade and the waking world. Solas walked the old roads that he had not traversed in lifetimes, found their old hideaways that were now nothing more than crumbling ruins, hoping beyond hope that he might hear and feel the beckoning call of her unique soul. Even the spirits that had been his friends for an age had not been able to assist him and, disheartened, Solas resigned himself into thinking that perhaps her own spirit had grown weak and weary of waiting for him. Perhaps she had finally found the rest that she deserved.
When she and Cassandra met them on the way to the forward camp, Solas had his answer. She hadn't been hiding… she wasn't there at all. There was nothing familiar about Lavellan aside from the face she shared with one he had loved more than anything. Her spirit didn't recognize his as it always had before.
It was for the best, he told himself even as his heart constricted. Better that there was nothing to remind him of her. Perhaps this time he could protect her. Perhaps this time she would live. Perhaps this time fate would be kind to them.
Still, Solas didn't know what was worse: realizing that she wasn't the same, while he had not changed, or knowing that he loved her even so.
It just gets worse from here. UGH. I can't.
Let me know what you think!
-(gxr)-