Oops, this was supposed to go up with the last one, and I totally forgot.
Just to let you know, I may be slowing down with the posting schedule for a bit. My editor is moving and job-searching, and I'm burnt out on editing anyway. I'm not going anywhere, just changing my focus for the next 2-3 weeks.
Solas Reflects on Martyrdom
"She doesn't even realize, does she?" Varric sighed.
Solas glanced at him curiously, though it was admittedly difficult to pull his eyes away from Inana as she moved among the injured, formerly enslaved elves, her face alight with a fierce tenderness. "What realization do you mean?" he asked the dwarf.
"Really, Chuckles? Look at her - brighten up her armor, slap a halo around her head, that shit could go up on a chantry wall. 'The Herald of Andraste Ministers to the Freed Slaves of Tevinter.' Something pious and long-winded." He scoffed, but Solas noted the way he studied the scene, as though trying to absorb every detail.
"Hmm," Solas exhaled slowly - not quite an agreement, but not far off. "She would hate it," he pointed out.
"That's exactly why they'll do it," Varric muttered in response.
"As though you aren't intending to write about it," the mage scoffed in turn.
"Of course I am," Varric groused. "Someone has to get it right. She's not all charity, and benevolence, and compassion, and 'the holy light of the Maker' - she's fucking pissed , and someone needs to remember it and put it down somewhere."
Solas probed their bond, and was surprised to find that Varric was right. He wondered, briefly, how he had missed it - and then realized how familiar her deep, slow-burning rage felt. It was a twin of the emotion that had sustained him through the centuries between Mythal's death and the raising of the Veil, an emotion that still goaded him to action even now. Inana's visceral hatred of slavery mirrored his own - and yet it was also purer, spontaneous in a way his had never been. She had not required centuries of increasingly horrific atrocities to teach her that freedom was a precious birthright of all thinking creatures.
"I doubt she will appreciate your version, either," Solas told the dwarf quietly.
"Only because she'll think I'm giving her too much credit," Varric replied.
"She won't be wrong - or, at least, she will not be wrong once your words are read and interpreted," Solas said. "Those reading will get the vicarious thrill of observing one minute injustice righted - and forget that we have freed, at best, two dozen formerly enslaved elves, while those that remain within Tevinter's borders number in the thousands, and there are yet thousands more who have enslaved themselves to the Qun." He shook his head. "One woman, though inspiring, won't solve this world's troubles."
And she was, he admitted to himself, profoundly inspiring.
"You think I don't know that, Chuckles?" Varric huffed. "One inspiring woman couldn't solve a single city's problems, and Hawke has a self-preservation instinct that actually works on occasion - a quality I haven't seen much evidence of in Vanish."
Solas thought uncomfortably of Haven - and of his own words to her earlier in the evening.
"They're going to try to martyr her, one way or another," the dwarf continued angrily, "and I don't even know that she'll fight them if someone convinces her there's a good reason to step onto the pyre."
Varric was, Solas decided as he carefully put aside the dizzy panic that tried to catch him in its grasp, entirely too insightful in ways that bore careful observation - but in this case he couldn't be ungrateful for the quality. "It's well that she has us, then, to convince her otherwise." He didn't wait for Varric's reply, but, seeing Inana's head come up as she realized she had finished with the last of her waiting patients, stepped forward to meet her.