As the sun rises above the vast mountain chain surrounding Skyhold, and beams of light illuminate the musty carpet upon her floor, Ellana Lavellan wakes. With a stretch of arms above her mussed chestnut hair, she sits up, rubbing the last remnants of sleep from her eyes. She turns to the empty half of the bed beside her, long turned cold, and sighs. Then smiles, faintly. Ellana turns to the side, and stands. The carpet is cool beneath her feet, and she shivers at the breeze coming through from underneath the balcony doors, rustling her sleep clothes, though the sun is slowly heating up the room. The coming of spring has been a blessing, as she no longer needs to have a fire consistently burning throughout cold winter nights. It does help that she has had another body to warm her bed.
Thinking of him, she smiles and moves toward her desk, picking up her brush as she moves to sit, and pulls her mirror towards her. Ellana checks out her reflection in the mirror, and chuckles quietly at how messy she looks. Her forest green and tawny eyes are more red than usual, due to a lack of sleep. Worth it, she thinks as she gently pulls the bristles of her brush through her tangled, wavy hair a few times before setting the brush down to braid it, and reminisces about the night before.
A quiet knock at her door late into the night, long after she had fallen asleep, woke her abruptly. When Ellana opened it, she found him standing before her, still wearing his armor, looking sheepish as he scratched the back of his neck. He looked quite awake, in comparison to the late time.
"Cullen," she felt a bit self-conscious in her thin nightdress, and tried not to cross her arms over her chest to better conceal herself, though it was difficult not to. He had already seen her without clothes, in candlelight on his desk about a week before. Things had been a bit awkward since then, and it was difficult to meet eyes when they both would break out into a nervous sweat and blush, tomato-red. Leliana and Josephine were quite tired of them both. But it shouldn't have mattered. The thought of their night together still made a rosiness creep up her face. Ellana imagined Cullen could see the outline of her breasts through her papery shift, and that made her turn an even deeper shade of crimson. By the Dread Wolf. "Is something the matter?"
Cullen continued to awkwardly scratch the back of his neck, eyes downcast towards the floor. His face was unusually pink.
"Ah, Inqui - Ellana, I'm sorry to have woken you. If I had known you were already asleep, I would have…"
"Nonsense," she couldn't help but smile, moving aside to allow him to move past her into her quarters. "It's no bother. Please, come in."