A/N: Long time no see! Sorry for the absence - I finished up my epic-length Pirates fic, and then spent some time focusing on actual novel work, but I've been very excited to get back to this! Thank you for your patience and your lovely comments.

It had been a long time since Evelyn had the joy (and by joy she meant horror) of getting ready for a date. A non-staged date, at least, casual and unofficial as it may have been. After, well, everything with Alistair, there had been a few shows of vague effort. Lunch with some random, a movie with another, all suitable Marcher lords and such, in a pitiful attempt at downplaying just how serious things had been with Ferelden's King. It spoke volumes as to just how transparent that gambit was that not even the worst of the tabloid rags picked up the stories.

This was the sort of thing she should be doing all of the time, if the nagging of her friends and relatives was to be believed. As it was, it was the sort of thing she barely did at all these days, and so she had no idea how to feel. Or what to wear. Her wardrobe was divided into formalwear - which, given who she was, was excessively formal, with tiaras and diamonds and all that - garb for when she was working, and what was left afterwards was mostly activewear and pyjamas. Bunny slippers and riding tights hardly seemed like the way to go. That was third date material, at the very earliest.

On those last "dates", she hadn't cared a whit about what she was wearing. Even now, she could scarcely remember it. She'd been numb, heartbroken and missing Alistair. And with Alistair himself, well…that had been different. The first few times they met were all official functions, she'd been bedecked in jewels, and he'd liked her in spite of it. There had been dates after that, sure, and she did remember what she wore on those, but that was a lifetime ago, and this was different. Cullen was not Alistair. Nor did she want him to be. Going back wasn't something she was interested in…whatever the gossip columns speculated.

She'd narrowed her selection down to a white jumper, soft as silk, atop a strappy red floral sundress, and had moved onto debating shoes when the door to her rooms burst open. Listening from inside her walk-in wardrobe, Evelyn mused over a pair of brown high heeled boots as a pair of stilettos all but pounded against the hardwood flooring of her bedroom next door.

"Evelyn? Evelyn."

Her mother's voice ordinarily had a bit of a shrill quality to it, and it would be an easy mistake for the uninitiated to assume that when she was upset it would get more shrill still until it reached a pitch only dogs could hear. In fact, the opposite was the case, her voice low and far more authoritative and queenly than it ever was when she was actually queening.

"In here," Evelyn called.

She barely had time to dip in and out of a curtsey as her mother stormed into the room before she was having a paper brandished before her. Some lucky photographer had managed to capture the exact moment Cullen's elbow made contact with her nose, but few papers went with that shot - not for the front page, at least. No, that was reserved for the one that the Marches, and further afield still, were abuzz with. The one in which Cullen fussed over her, a look of horror on his face as she smiled sheepishly up at him, blood dripping down her face.

"Evelyn Victoria Easton, have you lost your mind?"

"There was no sign of a concussion, no," she said, straightening and turning back to her footwear dilemma.

"I am aware of how most Marchers find you charming, but I am not a Marcher and I do not share in that opinion," her mother snapped.

While her mother was indeed not a Marcher, Evelyn resisted the very strong urge to point out that she did happen to be Ferelden, and there was one very significant Ferelden who also happened to find her charming…once upon a time, at least. But she didn't want to talk about Alistair - least of all with her mother, of all people, so she kept that comment to herself.

The fact that there was now another Ferelden who also seemed to think she wasn't half bad was harder to keep unvoiced. But she didn't want to spoil whatever curiosity and rare (for her, at least) girlish giddiness was slowly budding over Cullen by discussing that with her mother, either. Topics as sunny as world peace, chocolate, and kittens could be ruined by discussing them briefly with the Queen Consort of the Marches. If it wasn't so soul-destroying, it would be impressive.

"He is a templar, and you bled all over him. What if he sensed something? In the blood? Felt something? Residual amounts of lyrium remain in the blood for- for years afterwards. And for all we know he's lying about no longer taking it."

Her mother spoke with such conviction that one might thing she'd actually done the research before committing to this fear-mongering. Were her words not rooted firmly in paranoia instead of fact.

"It doesn't matter. He could be subsisting solely off of lyrium all day every day and he wouldn't be able to sense a thing in the blood. That's a myth, likely started by them to scare apostates into giving themselves up so they don't need to skulk around trying to catch us in the act."

"Yours is not the only reputation on the line here."

It never was, was it? But her mother was pressing on before she could even be tempted to and then talk herself out of voicing that.

"Our position is a delicate one. Just because they're tickling your chin now doesn't mean they won't slap you in the face in a moment. How can we maintain that we have a divine right to rule - that this very divine right is passed down in our bloodline if that same bloodline produces your kind?"

It should probably worry them more that this fabled bloodline had produced her brother, the walking embodiment of entitlement and instant gratification that was Adrian Fordham Trevelyan.

"It would look more suspect if I avoided Templars like the plague, given our family's long-standing ties to the Order and the Chantry. If anything was even vaguely suspected, we'd have heard of it a long time ago - they delight in nothing more than speculating on me and my life."

"And you delight in nothing more than that."

"Yes, I particularly enjoyed it when it robbed me of the love of my life, you're so correct," she snapped.

The look that earned her was a dangerous one indeed. Her mother had always been rail-thin, but when she glared at her now she looked positively gaunt, her lips pursing until the lines around them deepened into crevasses. Evelyn looked away, her own lips thinning until they ached just so that she'd hold back excuses and explanations - that she was speaking in past-tense when she referred to him as such, that she'd never be daft enough to voice that outside of this room and this family. Voicing it only made it sound untrue, and it was not untrue - not on either score.

It didn't matter whether it was true or not, anyway. Not in her mother's mind. It made no difference, the same way the fact that her proximity to Templars (or former Templars) posed no threat so long as she controlled herself. All it gave her mother was a convenient stick to hit her with when she so chose, so she had a thin veneer of plausible deniability if anybody accused her of trying to pick a fight for no good reason. No, she was protecting their great terrible secret, and therefore their great terrible family. That warranted a little bit of anger. A snippy comment or ten.

In the space left by the silence, her mother scanned her eyes over her and then they narrowed suspiciously.

"You're dressed very casually. Where are you going?"

"Coffee. With a friend."

She'd only exchanged a handful of texts with Cullen, all of them more practical than conversational - making arrangements for where they would meet and when, during which she'd given him the address of a coffee shop in a 'prestigious' enough area that the sight of her wouldn't cause a commotion. Or any undue photographs being taken. Hopefully. He'd texted her again that morning to verify that they were still on for today, and that was about it, but she hardly took it as a bad sign. He didn't seem the type to hang onto his phone all day, typing paragraphs upon paragraphs to friends, would-be friends and…well. Whatever this might be.

"Wear the boots," her mother said "The running shoes make you look common."

At least she wasn't so afraid of appearing common that she called trainers running shoes. Evelyn waited until her mother was out of her dressing room, and then out of her quarters entirely, and then sat down so she could shove her feet into the trainers. It was a small form of rebellion, but one she allowed herself all the same.

When Cullen suggested a coffee to Princess Evelyn - after dabbing the copious amounts of blood for her nose, a detail he could not forget no matter how hard he tried - he'd pictured a cramped little shop with chipped wooden tables, chairs with uneven legs that jerked this way and that with every slight shift, and paper napkins. Okay, admittedly he hadn't pictured it all in quite so much purposeful detail. The suggestion had come from a moment of panic, and if there was any logic behind it, it was that dinner was too intimate too quickly, and far too easy to get wrong. Coffee didn't come with forty-eight different types of cutlery to memorise. At least he hoped it didn't. Anything was possible where this class of people were concerned - the more absurd, the more likely.

As arrangements for this coffee date - because, just like coffee sounded more casual than dinner, coffee date sounded more casual than date date - were cemented via a series of short but sweet text messages, the princess sent him the address of this place rather than letting him decide. Leliana warned him that would be the case, at least in these early stages; an issue of security rather than snobbery. The setting didn't bother Cullen, but two things about Leliana's explanation did. The first was that the phrase "these early stages" implied the existence of later stages yet to come, and his conscience still despised that thought. The second was that with any other member of this family, he'd have greeted the idea that this luxurious choice (because since when did coffee shops have Michelin stars?) was not rooted in snobbery with a great amount of skepticism. But with Evelyn he did not question it.

And yes, he could cynically argue to himself that this down-to-earth persona she'd pushed forth so far - writing letters for wounded soldiers, moonlighting as a labourer as they set-up for their day of fundraising, and not regarding him with anything so much as resembling scorn when he ended that day early by almost breaking her nose - was meticulously crafted with the aim of basking in the love of the gullible public who bought into it. But it wasn't an argument he really believed. Was it crafted? Yes. There was no doubt about that. She wasn't a fool. However, he didn't think her reasoning malicious. Ridiculously, some small part of him struggled to believe there was a malevolent bone in her body. The Evelyn Effect, it appeared, was a very real thing.

Or maybe he was just thinking with a part of him that he very much hoped to keep out of these proceedings. That was what Rylen would say.

Whether it was real or not, the outcome was the same. As he sat at the table, which was decked in a blindingly white cloth that probably cost more than his whole outfit, he felt more nerves clawing at the inside of his abdomen than he ever had before any battle. The trick was keeping himself occupied, though, so he leafed through the gift he'd brought for her - one of the novels she'd asked him to recommend. That had been his idea. The task of scrawling annotations and errant comments in the margins, however, was Leliana's.

It's personal. More than you'd think - and it'll have her thinking of you when you're not present. It stops you from being out of mind when you're out of sight. Maybe when she's alone, reading in bed at the end of a long day, her thoughts will turn to you.

His responding comment had been laden with much muttered profanity. But he obeyed. That was what he did these days, wasn't it? At first he felt like a prize twit doing it - underlining a particularly prudent passage here or there, scrawling a note or two at the bottom of the page, but the more he got into it the more he allowed himself to have a little fun with it. By the time a pair of chunky white trainers stepped into his peripheral vision, he'd almost forgotten why he was here at all.

Gaze lifting - and skimming over a pair of long, lean legs, a red flowery dress that seemed to swish about her form with every slight movement, a cosy white jumper, and then finally on her face as she smiled down at him - Cullen remembered himself, belatedly, and hoped he hadn't just been giving her a very lecherous once-over.

"Hello you," she greeted warmly - and somehow managed to make you sound like a term of endearment.

"Prin- er, Your Royal Highness," he rose quickly, the chair scraping on the fine wooden flooring as he did "I didn't notice you, ma'am, forgiv-"

"Neither of us is on the job right now, Mr Rutherford, there's no need for all of that," she said "Unless you'd, er, rather be formal…?"

"No - no, not at all," he sighed "Forgive me, I'm…this isn't something I'm particularly used to."

"You don't brunch with princesses often?" she offered a teasing smile.

"Isn't it obvious?"

"Only because the only other available one I can think of off of the top of my head happens to be eighty, and a widow."

"She rejected me."

The princ- Evelyn laughed at that, shaking her head fondly at him as she teased "Ah, I'm forever doomed to be the spare, then."

Cullen rounded the table and pulled out her chair for her, just to give himself something to do, and as she settled into her seat and he returned to his, he found himself grateful for her ability to set others at ease. He'd never have been able to get through this otherwise, nor say what he did next.

"You look lovely, by the way."

It wasn't a lie - not one bit. In fact, he was left feeling distinctly caught off-guard by just how lovely she looked. It was different to the other times he'd seen her. During that first meeting, and the visit to One Day Soon's headquarters afterwards, she'd looked immaculately professional, like she could stand up and give a speech at any boardroom in the Marches and have the room hanging on her every word, even had she not been royalty.

The fundraising day had been more casual, yes, but that had somehow been different. Perhaps thanks to her painstaking awareness of the ever-present audience. She'd said it herself - she'd been on the job. In princess mode, whatever that was when it was at home. While Cullen wasn't naive, nor arrogant enough to think he was seeing her truly at ease, there was just something more personal about how she presented herself today, her hair a little messier, her clothing not tailored to within an inch of the fabric's life. Her smile, though, was just as bright as ever. Although he did a double-take when he swore he detected a hint of something else around her eyes. A tightness of the like that had spurred him to escort her to the roof that one time.

"Thank you," she said "So do you - very handsome."

The only control he'd had over his appearance today was his hair, styled as it usually was, despite Josephine's laments that he should leave his curls untamed. She'd won the war when it came to the jeans, though, and the burgundy shirt with the top couple of buttons undone. The decision to have his sleeves rolled up had been an unexpected input from Cassandra. Women like to see a man's forearms, she'd said - albeit through a blush that threatened to match the shirt itself.

Judging by the way Evelyn's eyes lingered on them for just a moment before they finally landed on the book before him, she'd been correct. Cullen wasn't sure whether he wanted to glean more looks like that from her. On a professional level he knew what the answer should be, the problem was that the answer was becoming a bit muddled on a personal one…and he knew this date was unlikely to help put an end to that.

Not if she kept smiling at him like that.

A/N: Find me elsewhere here –

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