Chapter Text
She nearly told him. She’s breathless with her own stupidity. Creators, she nearly told him. What was she thinking?
She’s so preoccupied that it takes her a while to notice birdsong outside, light coming through the canvas of her tent. She’s been away a day, perhaps more. She’s wasted enough time.
She sighs, running her hands through her sleep-tangled hair and trying to make herself move. Skyhold is calling her. Too much might have happened while she’s been away. She’s the Inquisitor, and she will not hide away from responsibility because of some… some shem. She winces. No, that’s unfair.
She pulls herself from her bedroll, from sleep, and begins packing her things.
She sends a message ahead of her that she’s returning to Skyhold. She watches the crow soar, and yet her heart sinks. They’re both following the same path, but they feel very differently. She wonders what Leliana will think; wonders exactly how obvious it is that she’s running from her responsibilities. They might even be laughing at her, if they know why she’s doing this. She hopes with all her heart that they don’t. She has one adviser who particularly looks down on negligence, who would be irritated that she’s allowing something so irrelevant to interfere with her work. And yet he’s the reason. Dammit, if his Maker does exist, then He has a sense of irony. A rather cruel one.
She shakes herself from her unpleasant reverie. If she keeps thinking she’ll never start walking, and she can’t delay anymore, even if she’d like to. It will only make things much, much worse.
The walk seems almost infinite. She keeps herself… not entertained, more like sane, thinking of all the things she shouldn’t tell him, such as I always seem to be thinking of you, or I have the feeling I’d be dreaming of you even without this strange situation, or there are days when I wondered what would happen if I grabbed that ridiculous furry surcoat and pulled you towards me and…
She coughs, realizing that she’s probably an unflattering shade of pink. This man, she thinks, needs to get out of her head.
There’s a breaking of twigs behind her, a rustling of leaves. She starts to turn, looks for the crow...
Then the Venatori step out from the shadows, and never mind her feelings, she wonders if the rest of her will ever make it back to Skyhold in one piece.
Fenedhis. She’s healed what she can with magic, but it was a big fight – eight of them, one of her – and there are still a few wounds. Small, not about to kill her, but significant enough to hurt. She crawls into her hastily set up tent, still dressing her arm, a bandage held between her clenched teeth.
She wants to get up. She wants to walks back to Skyhold, to take some sort of giant Fade step and simply appear there. Most of all, she wants Cullen. He’d know what to say; he’d offer reassurances, help treat her wounds. She’s used to simply healing herself; she didn’t see any fights when she was with her clan, and so there was always enough mana, rarely anything so bad that she couldn’t deal with it. All these poultices and potions and bandages… They aren’t foreign to her, but they’re still relatively new.
She muddles through as best she can, but by the time all the bleeding has stopped and she can put her weight on her left leg again, she wants to pass out. She ends up piling her blankets on the floor of the tent. She only means to rest her eyes for a few moments, but by the time her head hits the makeshift pillow, she’s unconscious.
An office. No, not an office… a library. Books line the wall as far as she can see, fading into the distance and out of view. She looks up and sees the same; there are no ceilings here. A strange place.
She takes a step and it echoes. The floors are marble, but she only knows this after she has heard the echo. She must be in the Beyond indeed.
A soft flutter of paper, as if something has been knocked to the floor. It came from ahead of her, behind a row of shelves.
She can’t help it. Though it feels like… bait, she still walks to see what it is. Her footsteps feel too loud in the silence. She has never been a hunter, she has never been…
She sees Cullen, and with him is a woman. Short, dark-haired. That’s all she sees. And they are kissing desperately, pressed together. The dream-woman turns him, pushes him gently until he’s against a bookshelf, her hands on his hips, fingers curling in the fabric of his shirt. Ellana catches a glimpse of pointed ears but little else.
Ellana tries in vain not to lick her lips. She shouldn’t be seeing this, and she certainly shouldn’t be jealous of Cullen’s dream, whoever she is.
She hears Cullen gasp for breath quietly, probably unconsciously, and then the couple break apart. Cullen rests his forehead against the woman’s, runs a finger over her collarbone, and then he smiles. The purity of it makes Ellana’s heart ache. “I wasn’t sure, but I hoped…” he says, his voice still rough, breathless. He reaches up to cup her cheek, and she turns away, fond, embarrassed…
Oh.
Ellana is rarely fond of mirrors, but she recognises herself in profile. The fullness of her lips, the tilt of her chin. The way she ducks her head.
She steps backwards, needing to be gone, to have not seen this, and bumps into a bookshelf. The collision isn’t loud, but it’s loud enough. Both Cullen and the dream-Ellana glance her way.
His eyes widen, pink crawling up his cheeks, and horror crosses his face. “I… Ellana? I didn’t - ” He looks at the dream-Ellana, but she’s gone, as if she’d never been. He’s left instead with… her, the real her, and what seem like miles between them. He takes a hesitant step forwards. “Maker, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
She wants to pardon him, or to pretend she hasn’t seen. Anything to make this better. Instead something makes her ask, “You dream of me?”
He opens his mouth as if to say something. Closes it again. He looks at the floor as he says, “Only recently.”
“Was that…” She tries to find the words, her chest tight, the shock of all this still in her blood. “Was that what you wanted? To be with” – she’s not sure she can say it, because saying it means she’ll have to believe it – “me?”
The silence stretches, and after too long, he nods.
“How long?” she asks.
“Since…” He rubs at the back of his neck, and he looks up but now he’s addressing the bookshelves, not her, why can’t he look at her? “Possibly since the lake. Perhaps before. I didn’t know what it was at first, and I didn’t want to believe – You’re the Inquisitor. I had no right to ask – “
“But if you did?”
Now he looks at her, frowning. “I don’t follow.”
“If you had the right to ask…” And now she’s taking steps forward, closing the gap between them until she’s standing in front of him. “What would you say?”
He stares at her, blinks a couple of times. Then he says, “I would say…” He inhales sharply. “Could you ever… Is there a world in which – I think of you so much, too much, and… would you ever want to be with me?” He’s looking at the floor again, still flushed with embarrassment.
“I would say yes.”
He raises his head, startled. “You would?”
She rises on her toes, a hand under his chin, and kisses him. Chaste, barely more than a peck. He makes a quiet noise that sounds like Oh, and then he’s responding, his hands rising to hold the small of her back, his mouth seeking hers. She hadn’t thought that… What with him being a templar, and his awkward bluntness, she hadn’t imagined he’d be able to kiss like this. Maybe it’s because this is a dream, but it feels… She doesn’t remember feeling like this before, with the others. This sends sparks down her spine, has her curling round him and running her hands over his shoulders, his arms, needing to touch him everywhere, her mouth opening for him.
It feels like it must have been several minutes when they part, and yet it was still too short. He inhales in the silence, taking a moment to open his eyes, and then just looks at her. She wants to shrink under the weight of it, the focus in his gaze.
She smiles at him. “Was that alright?”
His eyebrows raise in surprise, and he manages, “That was… Yes. More than that.” He leans down, and she wonders if he’s going to kiss her again –
And then she’s awake, her toes curling and her cheeks pink. She curses once, viciously, at the walls of her tent. She wonders how long she’s been asleep, and then she sees daylight and knows. Oh. Oh no. She’ll be far too late. She said she’d arrive this afternoon.
“Ellana!”
She turns and sees Josephine hurrying towards her, ruffles bouncing slightly as she runs, worry on her face. The woman finally catches up with her, and clears her throat. “I… Inquisitor.” She seems to have recovered her professionalism. She raises a hand to her carefully braided bun; only a few hairs have come loose, but she still grimaces. “What has happened to you? You seem…” She looks Ellana up and down.
Ellana belatedly realizes how she must look. Still bloodstained and exhausted, even with a night’s sleep. “There was some Venatori interference.”
Josephine nods. “I see.” She touches Ellana’s arm, looking her over once more. “I see you have done some healing yourself, but have you been to the infirmary? You should…”
“I don’t need – “
“You do,” someone says behind her, and then Cullen is entering the room, walking to stand in front of her. “You’re a proficient healer, but there’s only so much you can do. Why didn’t you take a team? They might have prevented this.”
She looks at her feet. She can’t exactly tell him the real reason, and so she manages, “You’re right.”
“I…” When she looks up, his jaw is clenched, but in discomfort rather than anger. He can’t quite meet her eye. “I’m sorry,” he says at last. “I was told that the Inquisitor had arrived covered on blood and visibly injured. I was concerned.”
At some point while he was saying this, he’s placed his hand on her arm. The touch is gentle, barely there, easy enough to shake off. She looks down at it, then back to his face, and he hastily steps away from her. He finally looks at her, and while he still seems uneasy, there is something softer in his eyes. He looks as though he wants to say something else, and she can’t help but remember the events of the previous night, the feeling of his mouth on hers, how gentle he was. She wondered whether that was a genuine dream rather than the bond, whether an image of him simply happened to be in one of her unconscious adventures, but she sees his face – the way he barely looks at her, the slight hint of pinkness in his cheeks, not obvious unless you’re looking closely – and knows. It happened. It may have only been a dream, but it was real.
Creators, it was real.
Now it’s her turn to squirm and look away. She wonders if it’s obvious to Josephine. It must be; anyone with eyes must be able to tell that something’s happened between them. An observer might not know the exact nature of it, but it’s definitely something.
Sure enough, when she looks over her shoulder Josephine is watching them, a hint of curiosity in her expression. It’s quickly wiped away when she sees Ellana looking, and she gives them a placid smile, nodding in acknowledgement and rushing away to do something else.
That leaves the two of them. “Cullen,” she tries. It’s strange, saying it like this. In reality. She takes a few steps closer to him. The solidity of him is more apparent when they aren’t in the Beyond, and Creators, has he always been this tall? “We need to – we need to talk.”
He nods curtly, opens his mouth as if to say something, and seems to decide against it. “I – You need to go to the infirmary. We can talk afterwards.” He runs a nervous hand across his jaw, through his hair, then he’s striding out of the door without another word, and she can’t help but wonder if she’s made a mistake. Maybe he’s thought better of what happened between them. Maybe he’s remembered that she’s the Inquisitor, that he’s…
I think of you so much, too much…
She tries not to blush, and she thinks that maybe she’s wrong. Part of her wants to give up, to hide and wait for this awkwardness to fade, but she remembers his worry, his words in the Fade, the fact that with him she can be Ellana…
She goes to the infirmary, and while she’s having her wounds seen to, she decides what she will say to him.
A meeting is called in the war room after she returns. She’s heading through the doorway when she sees that he and Josephine have already arrived. He looks up, his mouth once again opening briefly, as if he wants to say something, but he closes it and nods in greeting instead. His eyes meet hers and there is… something. A slowing of time, a new awareness, a pull. She, too, wants to say something, to comment on this and try to understand it, but they aren’t alone.
She looks to Josephine, who offers her a smile and a similar nod.
Leliana arrives soon afterwards, looking – in an understated, Leliana kind of way – harried and anxious. Apologizing for her lateness, she says that the letter she had expected from a scout hasn’t arrived. She hopes it’s due to ordinary impunctuality and delays rather than, say, a troop of Venatori.
Things continue as usual, except for the new spark, the way Ellana can’t quite look at him. The way she is constantly, unavoidably thinking of his hands, and his mouth, and the Fade.
And then the meeting’s over, or close to it. All that’s left is the leaving.
She’s heading through the corridor when Cullen clears his throat behind her. “Inquisitor – “ He hesitates, corrects himself. “Ellana.”
She turns. There’s really little else she can do. He’s watching her, and looking into his eyes it hits her again. The feeling of his mouth on hers. How much she’d needed it. The knowledge that he’d dreamed of her, wanted her. It leaves her breathless and a little flushed.
She manages, “I’ve found out about the dream-bond.”
“Cole,” he says, and when she stares at him, he continues, “He explained. Apparently he’d already spoken to you. It” – he looks away, swallows – “It still bothers me that he would do such a thing, that he took my thoughts and mydreams and…” He clears his throat. “But that’s not what I… What happened in the Fade – did you mean what you said? What you” – he clears his throat – “what you did?”
It’s heavier here, the weight of such a confession. It won’t simply be washed away when she wakes. But she looks at him, this strange human who has found his way into her dreams, who has shown her how to skim stones, who has such gentle hands and has shown such unexpected kindness, and she says: “Yes.” It’s louder than she expected, and she flushes.
Surprise crosses his face, and then he’s frowning at her. “That night, after the lake – you said, ‘It’s not just the dream-bond.’ You were going to tell me, weren’t you?”
She ducks her head. “Yes.”
She stares at the floor, but she hears slow footsteps approach her, and then there’s a hand under her chin, nudging her to look up, to look at him. He’s so close to her that she can feel the heat from his skin. He says, “You’ve seen the worst of me… You’ve seen Kinloch, and you still want this? Maker.”
She nods, just in case he’ll step back, think that there’s been some sort of mistake.
And then he’s pressing his mouth to hers, and it’s firmer than the kiss in the Beyond, stronger. She recovers from her surprise almost immediately, rising to meet him, and he’s walking her backwards, gentle but with that same firmness, that certainty. She goes with it, leaning on the wall behind her, glad of it as her knees threaten to buckle. He takes her face in both his hands, angles her head, deepening it until they’re pressed together, sharing breath. The hesitance he showed in dreams is gone – he kisses like a man in the desert who’s finally found water, or a charlatan who’s found religion. As if he’s been waiting his entire life for this, and only this. She realizes that dreams didn’t compare.
They’re silent for a few seconds afterwards, both of them recovering their composure, still watching each other’s reaction.
There is the smallest shuffle, probably the sound of a delicate slipper on stone, and they turn as one to see Josephine hovering awkwardly in the doorway. There is a distinctly pink tinge underneath the brownness of her skin, and she gives them a distinctly nervous smile. “I hadn’t realized… Well, I had suspected… Ahem. I’m happy for you both.”
Cullen does his best not to look horrified. “Was there something you – “
“It can wait,” she replies, and then she’s walking away, leaving them both looking at the walls, the floor, anywhere but each other, trying desperately to take back their dignity.
“I… um…” he starts, then seems to lose his courage.
Ellana remembers her decision in the infirmary, and she says, “Would you like to have dinner? Real dinner, in the… Not in a dream?”
That gives him back his cheer. He smiles at her, that odd, rarely-seen shyness returning once again, and he says, “I’d like that.”
She can’t help but reflect his happiness, beaming at him. “Good.” Once more, she takes his hand, and for a little while, the Inquisitor is Ellana again.