Note: Raen's behaviour, as called out by several characters in this chapter, is not supposed to be healthy or romantic, and she realises this quickly. I love the Solavellan romance but it has its issues and this is my take.
Contains a lot of Solavellan but has some big Cassandra/Lavellan hints towards the end. Enjoy!
The incident with the Abyssal High Dragon of the Western Approach is only the beginning.
It's not that she goes looking for trouble after that, because she'd already been looking for dragons, for practice for if they have to deal with Corypheus' one. But with Solas' reaction, she finds any vague worry she'd had about the potential consequences of seeking out dangerous creatures to disappear.
"Another one? Really?" Dorian asks when she tells her friends she wants to seek out the dragon spotted in the Exalted Plains.
"Fuck yes!" Bull exclaims, clapping Raen on her uninjured shoulder so hard that her knees almost buckle. "You're the best, boss."
"Let's just get this over with," Cassandra says with a roll of her eyes, but there's a tiny curl to the corner of her mouth.
Sera is checking over her arrows nearby. "Big talk, everyone. Can we go now?"
So they head to the Exalted Plains, and find the dragon. Although they had heard in advance that this dragon appeared to be the kind that breathed lightning as opposed to fire, Raen had not banked on how utterly frustrating it would be to not be able to wield lightning magic - her favourite - to best effect.
She is grateful for learning more about the rift magic now, and pulls magic from the Fade to recreate her fist and slam it into the dragon, over and over.
She gets so caught up in the adrenaline of it all, just slamming over and over, that she pays little mind to where she's ended up when a swipe from the dragon's tail has her jumping to the side to avoid it. It's just a bit of water, after all, what does it matter?
It doesn't matter. Not until the dragon breathes lightning right at her and she finds herself thinking: I can take a bit of lightning. I wield lightning. It'll hurt like a bitch, but maybe then Solas will come running again. Maybe he'll actually touch me, just for a moment or two.
She might have been right, if it hadn't been for the water she had already forgotten about. The water which amplifies the current and has her screaming with pain as her muscles contract and it feels like she's burning from the inside out.
Everything goes dark.
When she wakes up, everything hurts. Her body aches and stings and she gasps from it.
"Inquisitor," Cassandra says with powerful relief. She seems to be holding Raen in her lap in the back of wagon, and is staring down at her with worry.
"Told you she'd be fine," Bull remarks from nearby, his huge body barely fitting inside the wagon, his head lowered so his horns don't scrape the top.
Raen's head swims. "What-"
"You froze up when it breathed lightning at you, that's what," Sera says, voice shaking. "How stupid are you, anyway? You were standing in water. Why were you standing in water when it was shooting lightning everywhere?"
There was a reason. She's sure there was a reason. She can't remember it now. It hurts to even try and think, it hurts so much that she can feel tears in her eyes.
"Don't try and move," Cassandra tells her, voice stiff. "We're getting you back to Skyhold as fast as we can. The camps on the Plains gave us some healing potions to keep you going while we're on route, but you need a proper healer."
"Right," Raen murmurs. "I'm sorry. Did we kill the dragon?"
"We did," Bull says, with a smile.
"No thanks to your little stunt," Dorian tells her, and his voice wavers a bit, and Raen thinks she might have upset him. All of them, possibly. "You're normally so careful-"
Raen wants to say sorry again, but it's hard to make her mouth work right, and she feels darkness tugging at her.
The last thing she sees is Cassandra's face and the frown adorning it.
When she next wakes, she's in her bed at Skyhold, and Solas is there.
In the background, keeping their distance but watching out of worry, her friends form a bit of a perimeter, seeming to be keeping vigil and reacting strongly when they see her wake. Vivienne is at the foot of the bed as well, looking immensely frustrated for some reason, but similarly glad to see her come to.
All of it seems to matter little, when Solas is sitting on the edge of the bed and has his hands on her torso, his magic pulsing through her in a way that makes it hard for her to breathe. Unless that's just her injuries - that's always possible too.
"Solas," she says softly.
He looks at her, and for a moment there is a soft look that reminds her of all the times when he had said such sweet things to her. Then it is gone, replaced by something hard and angry, and her heart aches.
Her body feels mostly alright now. A little sore, but healed.
"It seems you know your magic after all," Vivienne says to Solas, rather loftily. Raen gives her an inquiring look, making the older woman sigh. "Your friend here refused to let me assist in healing you. Apparently his knowledge of the fade magic within your body made him the prime candidate for doing so. He may even have been right."
"She's awake and healed, isn't she?" Solas asks, arching an eyebrow at her.
"She is, and as such, I know when to admit defeat." Vivienne sighs, and offers Raen a small smile. "I am glad that you are alright, Inquisitor, and now I will take my leave. I have many things to attend to where I am needed."
"Thank you, Vivienne," Raen says to her.
She looks to the others, who are mainly wearing expressions of relief, except for Cassandra, who has that same serious, unreadable expression she had been wearing in the wagon. Raen may need to talk to her soon, if there is a problem there.
But first, Solas.
Raen looks at him, meets his eyes, and hopes that her plea is understood. He sighs.
"May we have the room?" he asks.
There are a few looks of disappointment, but thankfully nobody argues, and Raen expresses her gratitude to them all as they file out, leaving her alone with Solas, who gets up and starts pacing.
"This is exactly why you should still be taking me with you into the field!" he tells her. "If you insist on going after every dragon in Thedas, at least take me with you!"
"Well, I'm sorry that I don't wish to subject my friends to the awkwardness of our new relationship status."
"It doesn't need to be awkward. We are surely more than capable of acting like adults with many things needing to be done."
"Perhaps. But I'd prefer to just take my friends, and worry less about how I have to act or feel," Raen replies. "Putting on a huge charade is not my way, Solas, you must know that."
"You cannot expect me to sit by while you throw yourself into danger again and again!" Solas tells her. "First the Well of Sorrows, and now this!"
Raen swings her legs and gets out of bed. Her body is a bit stiff, but otherwise alright. He really has done an incredible job, apparently, which comes as no real surprise, since he has a command over magic like she's never seen, even if he does a good job at being subtle about it most of the time.
"Let's not argue about that again," she says. "I am the Inquisitor, and I will take whatever damn action I see fit. You don't get to tell me what to do, especially not now."
"You've always valued my opinion and direction, why should that change?" Solas asks, frowning at her.
She laughs rather incredulously. "I don't know, perhaps when it became evident that your opinion thought leaving me heartbroken in a glade miles from Skyhold seemed like a good idea?"
He winces. "It was an error of judgement."
"No shit!" Raen cries.
"Can we not make this about what happened between us? I'm trying to express concern for your safety-"
It's strange, how she could go from wanting his attention and touch so badly to now being so irritated by his entire presence that she almost can't believe it.
"I don't need you to express concern for my safety, I have more than enough friends who can do the same," she snaps.
"That's not - it's not the same-"
"Why not?" Raen asks, arching an eyebrow. "Are you trying to say you are more concerned than any of the others? That you care more than my friends? Because I dare you to say that in front of-"
"No! If you would just listen to me-"
"Make me," Raen tells him, stepping closer, staring him down. "Make me listen. Make me understand your concern."
He stares down at her, eyes conflicted and dark as she gets in his personal space, and she can see the tumultuous emotions raging in him.
Next thing she knows, he's spun her around and pressed her against her desk, kissing her. His mouth is hard and unyielding against hers and it's so good. Even a few weeks without this has been torture for her.
"Why are you so impossible?" he asks, and his anger shouldn't make her shiver in the best way but it does.
"You like me because I'm impossible," she tells him, and his grip on her tightens while his other hand pushes things off the desk, which makes her heart race with anticipation. They've had sex on this desk once or twice before, and she's excited at the prospect of doing so again.
"This changes nothing about what I said-"
"I don't care, just don't stop," she says, and so he kisses her, hand sliding down her back through the thin material of her shirt. "I need your hands on me."
"They've missed touching you, vhenan," he murmurs as one of the hands in question takes a handful of her arse as he has always been so fond of doing. Raen feels almost delirious with how good it feels to be in his embrace again, though it could possibly be a side effect of coming down from a serious injury.
"I only let it get me because I wanted to see you care," she exhales, "and to feel you touch me if you were to heal me."
He goes still, and pulls back to regard her with a look of bewildered horror. "What?"
She winces. "Forget I said that."
"Please tell me you aren't that utterly stupid, vhenan," he says, voice trembling with the force of whatever emotion is rising in him.
"Only for a moment," she says softly, torn between regret and an odd triumph because it had gotten her exactly where she wanted, for all it had gone wrong. "And I had forgotten I was standing in water. It wasn't - it was only partly intentional, I didn't mean-"
"You didn't think, you mean," he says, the anger coming back. He looks like he wants to be sick. "Am I supposed to appreciate that you would put yourself in danger out of some completely ill advised hope for my attention?"
"No, of course not," she says, wincing. "I just-"
"You just what?!"
"I just needed you!" she cries. "I need you and I couldn't have you and I needed to do something but I got it wrong and I paid for it!"
He stares at her with disbelief and heartbreak and fury. "You can't do that, vhenan. This can't ever happen again."
"Can't it?" she asks, with a little ironic laugh. "I got exactly what I wanted."
His face twists. "Well, that's easily fixed. I suppose I'll have to give you too much of what you wanted, then, so you don't try this again."
"What do you-"
She doesn't have time to finish her sentence before he's spun her around and bent her over the desk, hands yanking down her breeches and fingers sliding inside her.
She gasps at the sudden sensation. It's what she's been missing for so long, what she's been craving.
"Yes," she moans. "More, Solas, please."
"Quiet," he growls.
It isn't long before his own breeches are down and his fingers are gone, replaced. He takes her hard, and it's so damn good that she has no hesitation in moaning her appreciation. His hands are clutching at her hips with such a force that she is sure she'll have bruises, and she doesn't care.
He bends over her and nips at her neck, murmuring ancient elven to her. It always makes her shudder, even when she has no idea what he's saying.
His hand eventually goes between their bodies to touch her where she is most sensitive, and soon she is crying out as the pleasure takes her. He still doesn't stop, and she isn't sure she wants him to anyway.
It feels so good, even with the way that parts of her body are uncomfortably pressed into the desk over and over, that she never wants it to end.
"Is this what you wanted?" he asks.
"Yes," she gasps.
He doesn't seem to like that, and although she could have sworn it shouldn't be possible for him to fuck her any harder, he does. He has a strength in his grip she can't quite fathom, strength that doesn't even quite make sense.
It starts to hurt, but not so much that it overpowers the pleasure. With where her heart is at, it welcomes the complication.
She feels a sob wrench from her body, because it's too much sensation, but she doesn't want it to stop. She'd gladly take all of it and more, forever, if it means having him.
Finally she feels him spill inside her with a groan, and she lets out a tiny sigh that is half relief and half dismay. She doesn't want it to be over.
She can hear him moving behind her, tidying himself up. She releases her hold on the edge of the desk in front of her, surprised to find the joints in her hands sore from how forcefully she had apparently been doing so.
"Are you alright, vhenan?" he asks, hesitantly.
"Fine," she says, and shifts so that her toes can touch the ground and she can push herself off the desk and stand.
Her legs almost give out and she has to clutch the desk to stop herself hitting the floor. Her body aches, more and more with every second, like the pleasure had kept her from feeling everything else.
"Ow," she murmurs, a bit shocked, but with a curl of dark satisfaction to her lips.
He stares at her, face as unfathomable as ever. He makes no move to help her.
"This will not happen again," he says firmly. "You will take care of yourself, vhenan. Rush into danger if you must, but nothing like what happened here."
She nods. He's right, of course, he so often is. She knows, deep down, that what she had done had been stupidly reckless, and that she just needs to wait. She's the Inquisitor, for fuck's sake, she can be patient enough to wait until Corypheus is dead to get what she wants and needs from him.
"Goodbye... Inquisitor," he says, before leaving.
Raen is left clinging to a desk as her legs shake and a powerful ache fills her body where he had so roughly taken her. She's not sure it stings as much as his use of her formal title after all that, though.
"What the fuck am I doing?" she asks herself.
There is barely time for her to clean herself up before there is a knock at her door.
"Who is it?" she calls, still pulling on a fresh shirt.
"Cassandra, my lady."
Cassandra, who had been eyeing her with such a complicated, unhappy expression earlier. Cassandra who she apparently needs to talk to.
"Come in."
Raen sits on the edge of her bed as Cassandra enters and comes up the stairs and then does a double take.
"You are up and about."
"Practically the moment you left," Raen says, with a little smile. "Solas knows what he's doing. He would never do a sub par job."
"Of course," Cassandra says slowly, brow furrowing. "You talked with him a long time."
Raen means to say something in agreement, something nonchalant and smooth that would never arouse suspicion, but she can't help but flash back to the feeling of him, to intensity of the pleasure. She bites her lip, her cheeks warm.
Cassandra's frown deepens, and her gaze moves to the desk, most of its contents on the floor and - Raen's breeches still on the floor by the desk where she had left them before seeking out new ones.
The sheer disbelief on her face would be comical in any other situation.
"Inquisitor-"
Annoyance rises in Raen's chest for no particular reason, and she feels the need to get defensive, just a little. "Is this where you scold me? Tell me I'm sinful and should repent?"
"You said you were 'paused'," Cassandra says, sharply.
"We are. This was a… debate."
Cassandra stares at her, and her eyes go to Raen's neck, where she knows a few bruises are starting to form from where Solas' mouth had marked her. Cassandra's skin darkens a shade.
"Ordinarily I would say this is none of my business-"
"Seems to me that it isn't any of your business," Raen agrees.
Cassandra glares. "However, given that I watched you allow yourself to be electrocuted by a dragon today, and that I believe I am the only person who truly understands why you did such a thing, I am making it my business. I saw how you were after the Western Approach, how you seemed hurt by his not paying much attention to you after he knew you were alright. Can you truly tell me that this was not an attempt to get him to-"
She looks at the desk again and flushes.
"I just wanted him to talk to me properly, like he cared," Raen says softly. "Maybe feel his hands on me. I'd forgotten I was in water and what that would mean. It was stupid of me."
"It was blatantly moronic, and for what?" Cassandra snaps. "For some man who abandoned you after breaking your heart? Who you say you are paused with but allow to-"
She cuts off, looking at the desk and then back at Raen.
"I will not pretend to understand," she says, swallowing. "I am relatively inexperienced in affairs of the heart, and this is not the kind of thing that is found in the fanciful, ridiculous books I read."
"I know," Raen whispers.
"I understand that you love him," Cassandra continues, walking forward, "but what I will never understand is how you could put yourself in danger, put everything we have ever worked for in danger for him. Not even to help him, or save him, but simply because he-"
"I'm sorry," Raen tells her, feeling a bit ill as the real ramifications of what she could have lost today hit her. She stands up, to make a point, perhaps, or to get closer to Cassandra, but she wavers.
"Inquisitor, are you-"
"I'm fine, I'll just be walking crooked for a few days, I imagine," she mutters.
She thinks about it, about what she risked today, about what had just happened in this room and how much she had loved it, and finds her heart seized by fear and shame. How could she let this happen? How could she let anyone reduce her to this? This is pathetic.
Tears well up in her eyes, quite without her permission.
Cassandra meanwhile blinks, processes, and looks to her with concern. "Raen," she says, stepping closer, as serious as using her actual name implies, "are you alright? Did he… hurt you?"
Raen shakes her head adamantly. "He did nothing I didn't want desperately," she says, voice only a whisper. "And I think that might be the most terrifying part."
To say that Cassandra looks like she's out of her depth would be an understatement. She looks at Raen, seeming so lost that Raen's guilt only grows along with her shame. This is not something she wishes anyone to know. It's bad enough that she and Solas know it happened, let alone Cassandra of all people. (There are a few people where it could be even worse, like Josephine, or Cullen, or Mother Giselle, but not many.)
"I'm sorry," Raen whispers. "I don't know what's wrong with me."
"That is an apology for letting that dragon fry you, I hope," Cassandra says, sitting down on the bed next to her. "I do not feel qualified to accept an apology for anything else."
"It was for the dragon thing, don't worry."
"Good."
"Did you carry me out of there like the dashing hero in one of Varric's stories?" Raen asks, giving Cassandra a small smile. "Or did Bull just sling me over his shoulder like a ragdoll?"
Cassandra lets out the smallest of chuckles and shakes her head. "I carried you. But I doubt there was anything dashing about it."
"I'll be sure to ask Dorian his opinion."
"Oh, wonderful."
"What, you don't think you could be dashing?"
"Stop," Cassandra says, rolling her eyes even while her lips twitch with amusement. "You are impossible."
They fall into silence, the kind they have shared before while out in the field. Normally they are moments that Raen treasures, something about just being with Cassandra feeling so natural. This time feels different - recent events and their earlier conversation hanging over their heads.
"Is there anything I can do?" Cassandra asks quietly.
"I'd say keep me grounded but you already do that," Raen says, with a little shrug.
"I do?"
Raen gives her a funny look. "Of course you do. You're… half the reason I've kept my sanity and not developed some kind of ridiculous ego through all of this. You tell me when I'm wrong, or when you can see my point of view but don't agree with me, and you explain your side when we don't agree, and respect my decision regardless. You mostly manage to keep me sensible when we're out facing danger from day to day, too. I wouldn't be here without you, Cassandra. I wouldn't want to be, either."
"I-" Cassandra looks completely lost for words, her eyes wide. "I had never… considered it like that."
Raen reaches for her hand and gives it a little squeeze, making the other woman start at the touch. "You're one of my best friends, Cassandra. I know it can be common for people to say I don't know what I would do without you, but I really mean it. I would be… lost."
Cassandra hesitates, and then gives her hand a tiny squeeze back before pulling away. "I do not know what to say. I am… glad I am so useful to you, I suppose."
"You're making yourself sound like a handy inanimate object," Raen laughs.
"Well, I am inexperienced with profound confessions of sentiment, and know little of how I am supposed to react," Cassandra snaps.
"Your books don't give you any hints?"
"Those are completely different and you know it!"
Raen finds herself just laughing, and Cassandra looks away, her cheeks burning, but there's still the barest hint of a smile on her lips. There's something so satisfying about making Cassandra smile, whether it's one of these little ones, against her more serious will, or one of the extremely rare full ones.
"Are you truly alright? For the moment?" Cassandra asks eventually.
Raen considers the question, and gives a little shrug. "I'm not sure, but I think I need time to think everything over."
"If you do need to… talk. About Solas. I will do my best to listen, though I would understand if someone else would be your first choice. Dorian, perhaps." Cassandra has her hands twisting in front of her, unsure.
"I'll think about it," Raen says. "Right now, I'm not quite sure what I need. But thank you."
"Then I will leave you to your thoughts, and your rest," Cassandra tells her, with a nod. "Until later, Inquisitor."
"Thank you, Cassandra, for everything."
With that, Cassandra leaves, and Raen is left with an ache in her chest, and an odd feeling of confusion. She hadn't even realised until she had been saying the words, but for all her embarrassing desperation around Solas, she would be truly lost if anything happened to her relationship with Cassandra. What would she do without Cassandra at her side through everything? Or without Josephine to talk to, when she is struggling with a difficult decision? Or when she needs Dorian and Bull and Sera and Varric to make her laugh?
Had she really so terribly lost sight of how important her friends are to her?
Raen climbs back into bed, hugs her pillow and tries to ignore the ever growing aches in her lower body.
Thanks for reading, please let me know what you thought!