"Why, Inquisitor?!" At the sound of her title, Herah spun around, bringing the qunari face to face with the angry face of Ella Hawke. Like her, the former Champion had looked better, both women still wearing the blood and grime of the battle they'd just survived, but at least they were still in one piece.

"Why what?", she asked, her reply sharper than she wanted it to be. After surviving their trip into the Fade, Herah had wandered away from the rest of the group, looking for some time free from exactly the kinds of questions she suspected the mage was asking .

"Why me? Why not Stroud? How could you leave him behind to die like that?"

"How could I…" The Inquisitor's voice trailed off momentarily as her frustration got the better of her. "Andraste's ass, Hawke," she snapped, "I don't think I've ever had somebody yell at me for saving their life before."

"That's not what I meant and you bloody well know it," Hawke yelled back, dashing her staff to the ground in her anger. "The Wardens needed Stroud, not me. They're a complete mess after what happened here, and he could've helped them to rebuild. What are they supposed to do now?"

"I don't know," the qunari admitted regretfully, running a hand over her forehead.

The Champion threw up her arms in exasperation. "Then why?"

Herah slumped down on a huge piece of broken stone that lay in the middle of what had once been a courtyard. In the deep black of the desert night, even the large qunari almost disappeared from view and a part of her wished she could do just that, vanish somewhere far away from all of this. That wasn't an option though, and it hadn't been for quite some time.

"Because I might fail," she finally said, giving voice to the doubts she felt that only someone like the Champion could fully understand. "I know I've been acting like I'm on top of everything, but I'm not. If I go down, someone else is going to have to take over for me."

Hawke's blue eyes widened incredulously. "And you think that should be me?", she asked. "That I should lead the Inquisition? After what happened in Kirkwall, you really think that would be a good idea?"

"Cassandra and Leliana did. They were planning for it to be you or maybe the Hero of Ferelden, not some qunari nobody had ever heard of. But they couldn't find either of you, and then the Breech happened, and I turned up with this mark that could close the rifts. Pretty soon, people were calling me the Herald of Andraste, and at that point, they decided to just go with it. But it was going to be you, and maybe it'll still have to be. That's why it was you that I got out."

The mage took a deep breath, finding some rubble of her own to sit down on. "I… I didn't know that," she told Herah. "That it was me they wanted. I'm not looking for that kind of responsibility. Not again."

Herah shrugged. "Since when does what we want matter?"

"Seldom," Hawke conceded. "But have a little faith and don't go giving away your job just yet. You're doing fine with this mess. As ugly as it was, we won a big victory here tonight. Corypheus lost his demon army and you even managed to save some of the Wardens."

Herah managed a smile. "Fair enough. Still, I feel better knowing you're out there, just in case."

"I am," the Champion agreed. "It might not be my first choice, but if it came to it, I doubt I could say no to the job, any more than you could. And about before, I'm sorry I snapped like that. I just… I've already lost way to many people that I cared about."

The Inquisitor just nodded and added simply, "Don't worry about it. Water under the bridge."

Hawke got up off of her rock with a sigh, picking up her staff from where she'd flung it. "I really should get some sleep," she told the qunari. "It's a long way to Weissshaupt and I want to get an earlier start in the morning. Besides," she added, "I'm not the only one who was looking for you." Herah raised a questioning eyebrow, and Hawke explained as she walked away, "I think you've got a pretty upset elf to deal with."

"You were in the sodding Fade?!"

It wasn't long after Hawke left when the elf in question found Herah, and judging by Sera's tone, she wasn't much happier about what had just happened than the Champion of Kirkwall had been.

"I mean, really in the sodding Fade?!", Sera repeated incredulously.

"Uh, yeah," Herah agreed flatly, not sure quite how to respond to the question, "We really were."

"That's not bloody all right," the elf protested, kicking a rock as she vented her concerns. "That's how Corypheus and all those other Tevinter fuck bags made Darkspawn and turned everything to shit. And now you went back there."

There was something adorable about Sera when she ranted like that, and Herah did her best not to smile. "I didn't exactly have a choice," she explained, holding up her hands defensively. "In case you hadn't heard, we were falling off of the top of the damn castle. Using the mark was pretty much the only move I had left other than hitting the ground very hard."

"Yeah, well, you should've…" Sera seemed all set to begin yelling again, but suddenly she stopped, her expression softening as she looked at the Inquisitor. "You should've not died," she declared. "I'm glad you decided not to die. And I'm sorry I yelled at you and stuff, but it was really bloody scary, watching it happen. There was that dragon, and Clarel going 'boom!', and then you all were falling, and then nothing. You were just gone."

"I'm sorry." She reached out and put a hand on the elf's shoulder. 'Trust me it was pretty scary living through it too."

In response, Sera moved closer, pressing herself against the qunari's body, while Herah brought up her other arm to complete the embrace. "I know that," the archer said, her usual fire mixed in with something softer. "Least there were plenty of demons and other rubbish to shoot while we were waiting for you to come back."

"No shortage of those tonight," Herah agreed, "Though I don't usually think of that as a good thing."

"Helped me not to think about stuff," Sera explained. "About what a stupid piss fuck world this is, where people like you go missing, and Wardens get turned in bloody demons, and holes get torn in the sky."

"Hey," Herah assured her, "I know it sucks sometimes, but the world's got good things in it too."

"Damn right it does," Sera agreed. "Like pies. And arrows. And… and horns." There was a catch in her throat as she listed the last item, and the lithe rogue brought a hand up to Herah's head, experimentally running her fingers along one of the wavy, dark horns that took the place of hair atop it. "These are so neat."

The qunari didn't have nerve endings there, but there was still something extremely intimate about the way Sera was touching her and what had started out as a reassuring hug was rapidly turning into something else. Herah was suddenly and highly aware of the way that Sera's leather armor-clad breasts were brushing against her chest and she felt a heat starting to pool in her lower body at the sensation.

From the blush spreading across the elf's face, she knew she wasn't alone. Sera stepped backwards abruptly and stammered, "Getting to know each other, yeah? That's what I said, wasn't it?"

"It was," Herah agreed quickly, aware of a decided hitch in her own voice as well. "How, uh, do you think that's going?"

"Pretty good, I figure," Sera told her, the archer visibly trying to catch her breath. "Starting to think we should move onto other ways of knowing. Better ways. Maybe talk about it once we get back to Skyhold?"

Herah was tempted to protest that they could discuss it now if Sera wanted to, but in the distance, she could already hear the sound of booted feet on stone and Cullen's voice calling out for her, and so instead, she just nodded. It would still have to be work before play unfortunately, and the Inquisitor knew that it was going to be a long trip home.