Thank you all for reading! Special thanks to suilven for the beta!
Leliana leaned back in her chair, lifting her teacup and inhaling the scent of the delicate spices. "Josie, you find the best blends."
"Actually, this was a gift. From … Antiva."
Hearing the minute pause, Leliana raised her eyebrows. "Oh?"
"Yes. From my mother." The answer came too hastily, and Josephine knew it as well as Leliana did. "Fine, then, if you must know, it came from Ciel. Lord Otranto."
"Ciel? You are on a first-name basis with your betrothed now?"
"He is not my betrothed! I mean, he is, but he is not."
Leliana laughed. "Josie, you are making no sense at all. You are aware of that, aren't you?"
"Yes." Josephine shook her head, putting her quill down and leaning forward across the desk. "Leli, his letters are—he is funny, and sweet, and intelligent, and he has plans, and …"
Putting the teacup down on the floor next to the chair, Leliana leaned forward in her turn, her elbows on her knees. "It has been a long time since I heard that flustered tone in your voice. It sounds good."
"It feels terrible," Josephine admitted frankly.
"Why?"
"Because I have no time for such things. The Inquisition requires more than all my time, and my family's business an equally large amount in its own right, and Corypheus is still out there … waiting for us. How can I take time out for my own … for myself, in the midst of all this?"
Without wanting to, Leliana remembered Nathaniel's dark eyes. "Why shouldn't you? What better time?"
Josephine's eyes were dark, as well, and they knew her equally as well as Nathaniel seemed to. She looked speculatively at Leliana. "Something you wish to share, my old friend?"
"Nothing." But she had spoken too hastily, and she knew it.
"Sauce for the goose, Nightingale. If there is no better time for me, then shouldn't that equally apply to you?"
Leliana shook her head. "Because I live with—in—darkness. Because I must continue to do so or I will be unable to perform the functions the Inquisition requires of me."
"You cannot lose yourself, your soul, in the service of this Inquisition."
"Have I not done so already? I … thought I had the blessing of the Maker. He told me to go with Leyden—the Wardens—but … then everything went wrong, and I—lost him. I lost the Maker's trust." She could hardly bear to look at Josephine, afraid that she would see condemnation, or, worse, disbelief, in her dearest friend's eyes.
"Has it ever occurred to you that the Maker stopped speaking to you because he no longer needed to?"
"You think what I do is the Maker's work?"
Josephine looked at her with kindness and sympathy. "You want to believe that the Maker is all love and beauty, and it is such an amazing thing in you that you have retained such innocence and purity among all you've seen, but surely the Maker has need for a Left Hand just as the Divine did—a Spymaster, just as the Inquisition does. Surely he saw the strength in you that allows you to be what you must and still have the belief in love that would allow you to counsel a friend to leave her heart open even when the timing seems wrong. Have some faith in yourself, Leliana, and in the Maker."
Leliana sank back into her seat, stunned. She had never considered things the way Josephine was suggesting. It shouldn't have been a surprise that her friend was so clear-eyed and thoughtful—what was a surprise was that Josephine had so incisively cut through Leliana's own illusions, illusions she hadn't even known she had.
"So the question is, what will you do?"
Collecting herself with some difficulty, Leliana smiled. "What will you do?"
Josephine laughed. "Go back to work, for the moment. As you will, no doubt. What we do tomorrow … is tomorrow's question, isn't it?"
"So practical, Josie, as always."
Blackwall looked up from his workbench, and then down again as he recognized the person who had interrupted him. "You shouldn't be here. There's nothing for you here." He didn't want to be blunt; he didn't want to hurt her. But he knew no other way to convince her to go and get her to listen.
"That isn't true." Lace Harding came closer to him. "Why won't you talk to me?"
"Because you know what I've done, who I am. You should despise me." Quick tears sprang to his eyes and he closed them, trying to keep her from seeing. "Why don't you despise me?"
"Blackwall." She laid a hand on his sleeve.
He shook it off. "Thom Rainier," he said harshly. "Don't romanticize me. Blackwall is dead; he has been these ten years. The man you think you know is nothing but a lie, told by a coward, to avoid his due punishment."
"That's the lie," Harding snapped, her green eyes bright with anger, and something else he dare not name. "You are a good man. You did something wrong once, yes. Who hasn't? And you lied about it. But you knew you shouldn't, even as you were doing it, and you tried your best to atone by becoming someone you admired. You didn't hide under the shield of Blackwall's name to continue harming people—you used his status to help others."
With all his heart, Blackwall wished that he could see himself, just once, the way she did. But he couldn't, and there was no use in trying. "You need to go."
"I can't. I won't."
"The Inquisitor will send you away."
She nodded. "He might, but I'll come back."
"And if I'm gone when you do?"
Harding smiled. "I'm a scout. I'm a good one. I can track a sheep across a rocky field, I can pick the one I want from the herd, even though they all look alike to most people. I'll find you."
He whirled on her, driven nearly to distraction by her goodness. "Why? Why must you torment me so with promises of things I can't have? If you weren't a dwarf, I'd swear you were a demon!"
For the first time her gaze faltered. She looked down at her boots, taking a deep breath. Then she looked back up at him, and her eyes were as steady and as kind and as … warm as ever. "I care about you, Blackwall. Thom Rainier. This man, here." She lifted her little hand, which could draw a bow and shoot an arrow with such power and skill, and touched him where her arrow had struck, and struck deep, a long time ago. "I care about him, and I won't let him destroy himself, not if I have anything to say about it." Harding took another deep breath, as if she were bracing herself, and went on, "And I think I do have something to say about it, because I think he cares for me, too, and that's why he's so Void-bent on shoving me away." She took a step toward him. "I won't be protected. I won't be pushed away 'for my own good'. I won't let you hide from me. If you want to go, far away where no one has ever heard of you, in either guise, then I will go with you … once Corypheus has been dealt with. But I am not leaving you to curl up in a hole and wait to die. Not even if you ask me to."
They stood there looking at one another for a long time, both of them breathing hard as if they had just run a long way. In Blackwall's case, it was in the effort not to run. Just standing here before her, standing like a man who deserved the name, was some of the hardest work he had ever done. But he believed that she would follow him, and he blessed her for it even as he despaired of ever being worthy of such devotion.
At last she stepped, back, still holding his gaze steadily with her own. "Think about what I've said. I'm going to Emprise du Lion tomorrow, but I'll be back. And if you're not here … I will find you. I don't care how long it takes."
For once, Varric had awakened brimming with ideas. Not only had he figured out exactly how Donnen Brennocovic was going to get out of his current mess, he also knew just how the Guard Captain in Swords & Shields was going to spurn the romantic advances of the handsome Templar. This time, anyway. He was going to have to get them together eventually, if only to satisfy the Seeker.
His fingers were already itching for the quill when he made his way to his table … and then he saw the rune, and it all flew straight out of his head. Instead, he saw the bright eyes that had captivated him from the start, the pretty face with the calculating, no-nonsense mind behind it, the body—well, fine as it was, that had always been secondary, hadn't it?
He sank into his chair, closing his eyes. Bianca wasn't going to give up, apparently, no matter how much he wanted her to. All he wanted from her was the distance she was so very good at, for her to take a step back and leave him be long enough that he could forget what she had done, forget that in her pursuit of knowledge she had taken what he had confided in her and opened the door for … some of the worst things he had ever seen.
He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. Instead of peace, she was pestering him. Once upon a time, he would have been delighted to be pestered. But not now. Not now when he didn't know what to say to her, or how to say it, or if he would be able to say what needed to be said in her presence. She had taken his trust and twisted it, and in so doing had made him responsible for everything Corypheus had done—more responsible than he had been to begin with, which was saying something.
If only he had never told her. If only he and Hawke had never set foot inside that fortress in the Vimmarks. If only she had let Fenris kill Larius. If only he had never talked Bartrand into that Deep Roads expedition … or talked Hawke into helping. Or … well, really, how far back did he have to go before he erased everything he had done? If the world was a nightmare, he had been the one to imagine it.
Picking up the pile of papers in front of him, weeks worth of writing, stupid stories that didn't do one single thing to make up for all the ill he had brought into the world, he threw them in a bundle into the fire, and he threw Bianca's rune in on top of them all, and then he went in search of something that would help him forget, at least for a little while, that every single bad thing that had happened since the Blight was entirely the fault of V. Tethras, Esquire.
He'd be drinking a long time.