Of Blizzards and Regret

Cullen hesitated for as long as he could. The signal flare held in his hands. He knew he should fire it, he should have fired it five minutes ago, but he couldn't. His palms sweat just holding it, and his hands shook whenever he grabbed the match.

Hesitation. Fear. Hope.

What kept him delaying the inevitable, the planned, were the same things that made Leliana pull her forward scouts as soon as one went missing instead of looking into it. The same things that made Haven so easily overrun in the first moments of the siege. And now what put the lives of the many at risk for the life of one.

"Commander, we can't wait any longer." Leliana took the match from his hands and lit the flare herself. He knew it had to be done, and why she did it herself. But that did not make the decision easier to live with.

"We're overrun. To hit the enemy we'd bury Haven." He remembered her trying to reason with him. She was always trying to get others to follow the logical path. Perhaps she already knew that he had thought that option through to its unsatisfactory end.

"This is not survivable now. The only choice left is how spitefully we end this."

Maker, he hated how he had even thought to say that to her; how he could have even thought that to die there, in a Chantry with her, would have been worth it.

"Ah! Cassandra!" Josephine ran passed Leliana and him, toward Haven. He shared only a brief look with the spymaster before they both ran after her, leaving the survivors for a moment with the trust that they could find their way for a little while.

It took seconds to run into the little group, but he noticed only how Lady Trevelyan was not there. Cassandra, Blackwall, and Bull stood tiredly, defeated, covered in the blood of Venatori and mages and themselves. But no Herald.

"Where is she?" Cullen didn't realize he said the words until they were already out his mouth.

"The Boss shoved us out of the battlefield when that thing showed up," Bull said.

And then the sky roared. Cullen had been on enough battlefields to know the sound of a trebuchet hitting its mark. All looked back toward Haven, despite being unable to see the town from their vantage point, but the avalanche could be seen, heard and felt.

"We…we should see to the survivors." It was Josephine who broke the silence with eyes wet with tears. Her head was bowed, so Cullen couldn't see if she actually started to cry, as she walked past them. Her companions followed, then Leliana. But Cullen stayed a second longer, watching and waiting for a sign.

But there was none. And the Inquisition could not afford to lose another leader at the moment.

"And when the mountain falls? What about you?" he had asked, though he had a terrible feeling about her answer.

Yet she only looked away. As she always did when she was going to lie, or evade answering. This time, she chose to keep her silence.

As he marched through the snow with the surviving members of the Inquisition, Cullen could think only of the look on her face. He shouldn't have been surprised, he shouldn't have even been at a loss for words as she was doing what she had been doing from the beginning: making the hard choices the rest of them could only squabble over. He had seen her look only so grim once, a little more than a month ago (had it really been so short a time? Sometimes it felt like she had been around longer than that), when she returned from her secretive mission to the Hinterlands.

More than that, she never met his eyes. She couldn't even look him in the face after she came to her own private decision to face them, to sacrifice herself. He was not a man who believed in goodbyes, and she was proving herself to be the same kind of woman, but in that moment—as she walked passed him to leave the Chantry, to face death—he wanted to stop her, to say goodbye. To make her look at him just one last time, to say with that teasing lilt he enjoyed to, "Stop worrying, or I'll have to worry that you really are that doting parent Varric believes you to be."

Instead, he stupidly told her to throw herself in harm's way; to catch the attention of what could be an archdemon. At least, he tried to assay his conscience, she had a Grey Warden with her and they could kill archdemons.

"If we are to have a chance—if you are to have a chance—let that thing hear you."

His last words to her haunted him when they finally made camp to wait out the blizzard. With only the howling wind and the heavy despair pressing in in every corner of their makeshift camp, everything he did wrong came to haunt him. His last piece of advice to her, specifically.

He had never fully understood before the meaning of the phrase, "you never know what you have until you don't," until this moment. There was no way he could continue to deny his growing feelings for her, just as there was no way he could deny that when imagining the future, one without her smile and maps and flirting would be a very bleak one. He hadn't even called her by her name once, even though it was really the only thing she had asked of him for herself.

The members of her little rag-tag band—her friends—had to feel the same way, if the way they listlessly moved around the campfire was any indication. Even Varric and Sera sat by the fire with no stories or laughter. Only that weird…boy? Spirit?...paced around, gripping and ungripping his hands as if holding his daggers, muttering to himself.

He stood and walked closer, pushing aside his feelings in order to investigate. While he would understand, the last thing anyone needed was someone having a breakdown. Especially someone as dangerous as whatever he was. He felt the pommel of his sword under his hand and pushed aside memories that he wouldn't get to have again.

"Cold…So cold. Why does it have to be so cold?" He stopped his advance when he heard the odd choice of words. "Cold. Hurts. Maker, tell me I'm heading in the right direction."

He watched as the mysterious boy stopped his pacing finally, and turned to look back the way they came. "What is it?" Cullen asked, never taking his eyes off him or his hand off his sword.

"Is anyone waiting?" he said. "She's looking for us. But she won't make it."

Cullen's voice caught in his throat. But Cassandra was there suddenly, possibly having kept her own eye on the boy. "You can't mean—"

He nodded. "She's out there. She survived. But only just."

"Can you find her?" He stepped closer to the boy.

"Yes. She's not far." And as if that was the permission he needed, the boy strode over to the edge of camp, back the way they came. He turned and followed after him, and he briefly heard Cassandra follow after him. He jogged passed many bemused and hopeful stares, but no one else bothered to follow that he could hear.

The boy began to jog as well, staying just ahead of them no matter how Cullen sped up. "Embers. Recent? Can't keep doing this… Too cold. Hurts. I can't."

He sped up hearing that, finally overtaking the boy and seeing the mountainous break that marked the very edge of their camp. He saw a figure through the lingering snowfall and knew immediately who it was, if only because of the glow coming from her hand. "There! It's her!"

He briefly recognized that Cassandra said something, but he focused on sprinting to her once he saw her begin to fall. Her knees fell through the snow, but he managed to catch her before the rest of her could fall into the snow. He had known and seen just how slight she was in build, but holding her in his arms made him realize just how true that was. He was sure his armor weighed more than she did, and he could feel the chill of her clothes through it.

Her teeth chattered and her eyes fluttered closed. He nudged her, not unkindly, but enough to get her to open her eyes again. "Stay with us, Evelyn. You can't sleep just yet." He stood with her in his arms and nodded toward the camp. "Cassandra, get back and inform Solas. She needs healing." And he began a longer trek back to the camp as he tried not to injure her further, and the boy walked beside him, keeping her awake.

She was safe now. His relief and his regret caused him to hold her all the tighter, and to keep a vigil from afar after she left his arms and was swarmed by so many others. Just like every time she came back to them. He could live with that if it meant she kept coming back.

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