Salem

I watched Leliana fall into an uneasy, feverish sleep. Her eyes worked, frantic, beneath her lids. I felt helpless watching this. It had taken all my will to keep my hands steady when I had forced the bolt through her skin. My heart had threatened to beat out of my chest when she cried in pain and fell into my arms. My fingers trembled as I held them before me; they were stuck to each other with Leliana's blood.

She would not meet my eyes, even though they held no anger. Neither would Genitivi when we came back to the temple. Why? What has changed?

Wynne walked to me, drying her hands. She offered a comforting smile.

"You are trying so hard not to love her." she said. It was not a question.

I sighed. "I do not know where we stand." I admitted. "All I know are my own feelings, and I will not burden her with them."

Wynne sat beside me on the edge of the bed. "You have a nobler soul than most." she told me. "Even my hands might have been...untender...when dealing with one who had left me."

"I doubt that." I offered a smile before looking away, down at my crimson smeared hands. "Wynne," I broached the question that had been nagging me since we had left Genitivi, "what is wrong with my eyes?"

The healer gazed at me, quizzical. "Why do you ask? Has something changed with your sight?"

"No." I hung my head, letting my hair shield my face, attempting to conceal my vulnerability. "But Genitivi would not meet my eyes. Neither would Leliana. Is there...is there something wrong?"

Wynne pursed her lips and her head tilted toward the ceiling, as though she pondered weighty thoughts and sought the proper words to voice them.

"They are...not as they were, Salem." she spoke at last. "You have surmounted the clutches of eternity and passed through trial by fire. I see death when I look at you. It haunts your gaze."

Maker's breath! Why? Must even my eyes be scarred by this damn Blight?

"Then why...why have all of the others been able to look me in the eye without flinching, without turning away. Why have you?"

I turned my new eyes to hers, piercing them. Wynne merely smiled.

"I have been a healer longer than you have lived." she said. "I have stared death in the face and fought it tooth and nail. Alistair is a warden; death is racing through his blood in the form of the taint. Zevran was an assassin; he made his living through murder. Oghren is of the warrior caste, and Morrigan simply does not care. The golem has lived for innumberable years and the qunari take a different view of things than we do."

I heard her logic; understood it. And yet.

"Leliana was a bard." I countered. "Her work with Marjolaine was akin to Zevran's with the Crows. Why would this...this change...affect her?"

Wynne chuckled, but it held sympathy. "She has the gentlest heart I have ever known, Salem." Wynne answered. "Gentler than even yours. Unlike the Antivan, Leliana has shed none of the burdens of her former life. She carries every life she has ever taken. And she has set herself to a new purpose, the preservation of life, rather than its ending. She loves you, Salem, utterly and completely. To see something she despises in the eyes of one she loves..."

"Loved." I spoke for the unconscious bard, mine no longer, unwilling to hope that she might have forgiven me, returned to me...returned for me.

"Loves." Wynne emphasized the word, the set of her lips and jut of her chin booking no arguments. "It is difficult for her, Salem."

I rose and pinched the bridge of my nose with blood-slick fingers. "Of course it is." I muttered, letting bitter realization overtake me. "No, Wynne. It is not difficult for her. I am difficult for her. I had harbored hope...I do not know. I thought, when I found her, that she might be returning to us. But now...now with this...how can she love me if every time she looks into my eyes she sees death?"

"Would you welcome her back, even if she had no love left for you?" the senior enchanter asked.

Would I? Maker, I am a fool. I had not even considered...Leliana might still desire to be part and parcel with this mission, though nothing to do with me. After all, how long can one fight against a vision given them by the Maker? Could I bear to be near her, fight with her in battle, only to be parted at the end of the day?

"I do not have an answer." I told Wynne. "I would like to believe that I could, but I doubt even my vaunted nobility reaches that far. I apologize if that casts me in a less than flattering light."

Wynne chuckled again. "It makes you human, Salem." she assured me. "But I believe the bard still loves you."

"You've said as much." I agreed. "I cannot allow myself that hope."

"You never do." Wynne shook her head. "I have never seen another who feared hope as much as you do, warden."

"With good reason." I defended myself. "It has been too often denied me. Even now," I gazed at Leliana, hating the crease of pain between her brows, "even now it lingers just out of reach."

"You should go for a little while, Salem." Wynne counseled. "Clear your mind, wash the blood from your hands. Wash all of you, in fact. There is a lake a short ways from here."

"Very well." I took her gentle hint, looking down at my ripped, tattered clothes, stained a muddy brown from dried blood.

With a lingering look at Leliana, I left the house and trudged to the lake. Burrow raced up to me and trotted alongside, an ever-present bulwark in this conflicting maze of emotion. He sniffed my hands and whined, recognizing the scent of Leliana's blood. The mabari and the bard had instantly taken to each other. Many a night we had lounged by the campfire, Burrow resting his massive head in Leliana's lap, the minstrel entertaining us with tales of ancient warriors and the legend of the mabari hounds.

I wandered into a copse of trees near the lake and divested myself of my clothing. I should be able to find more clothes somewhere in this forsaken place, I thought. This stuff is nearly un-wearable. I do not even think Wynne's needle could mend these tears.

I eased into the lake, gradually adjusting to the chill of the water. I looked down at my body, at the new collection of scars. The one beneath my breast, near my heart, where Leliana had nearly killed me to save my life. The gruesome pucker in my right side where Marjolaine had attempted to make me her last kill. Three wide swaths of scar tissue curved from the middle of my back, across my side, down across my stomach to my hip bone. Had it not been for my armor, I would have been torn apart by the dragon's talons.

I lifted my right hand in front of my eyes, staring at the odd scars left by the dragon's blood. The haphazard lines of healed skin were a strange, royal blue color that mystified me, even if it did possess its own odd beauty. The lines weaved around my fingers, down the palm and back of my hand, mixed with the rough, patchy scars where melted metal had adhered to my skin. I dropped my hand, wondering who would ever wished to be touched by something so disfigured.

At last, dreading it, I looked into the water's mirror surface, staring into my own eyes. Their color remained unchanged, but there was a light inside them that had not been there before. It was...cold, dark, discomfitting.

It is death, I realized. It has marked me as surely as any blade. Who...who would desire this body, tattered and scarred? Who could bear to lovingly meet the gaze of eyes that scream of mortality?

If...if Leliana does wish to return in order to help us defeat the Archdemon and nothing more, I will accept her. I would ask no one to love this body. I would ask no one to meet these eyes. But, I gazed back on the house that held the one dream I yet possessed, I cannot cease loving you, Leliana. If you ask that of me, I will refuse.