Chapter Text
"I know that look. Something on your mind?" Leliana has not worn a dress as tight fitting in some time. She appears all too aware of this too. With every second, her hands adjust the fabric caught on her waist, her shoulder. Beside her, Josie works to keep her gaze from following her lover's hands, an index finger swiping her nose to hide her smirk or tamp the rose clear on her cheeks.
Lel clears her throat. Thea takes a sip of her beer. Leliana used to clear her throat wherever Thea drew her back from that faraway look she'd donn while ruminating on Andraste. She has gotten better at keeping from sharing her thoughts with Thea. Likely Josie's influence. Time/place is a skill learned. (One Thea, herself, hasn't mastered for all her overt criticisms of others.) Recently these comments (the Maker loves everyone equally!) have been replaced with that look, where her eyelids lift a bit and she purses her lips to hold the thought back. Thea has determined this guilt can and should be wielded to get whatever it is she wants. Leliana hasn't worn this look so far tonight so Thea hasn't had a chance to order a getaway vehicle yet.
Lel raises her eyebrows in the way only she knows how and Thea sighs to allow a real smile through, but huffs at the off chance that her discontent is unclear to her present company. "As per usual."
"Let us make it worse, shall we?"
Thea bottoms the rest of her drink as Josie tugs the glass from her. Lel has her free hand and her finger unwittingly brushes the hangnail on her third finger—reminds Thea to pick at it when the pair isn't around to chastise her for doing so. And because Thea has never really been able to say no to anything Lel has asked for, and because Lel has never asked for anything impossible to give before, Thea follows.
It's past 10 and the hall has dimmed the lights. (Maryden's great aunt waves at Thea as she heads out of the hall along with a swath of people old enough to be ready for bed at sundown.) Music from the top of the century, two decades old now, has the room full of 20 to 30-somethings moving in ways they can only without the weight of perception under bright lights. Lel's dancing too—all too well, if compared to the rest—and the weight of her hands on Thea's shoulders forces some form of a rhythm to her own stiff form.
Thea, possibly beginning to feel just a touch of her drink, is filled with the warmth of her oldest friend. Earlier, at the ceremony, she caught the wedding party (Lel, Josie, faces she knows and cannot name) red and weeping buckets beside the couple at the altar and found herself wondering if she'll be the same when Lel and Josie finally save enough for the stagione they've planned for themselves. (Last Tuesday, as Thea walked to court, Josie (barely audible through Lel's phone on speaker) estimated around 13 events. The bridal showers and the engagement party will be held at the Grande Royeux Theatre and The Palace Opera House, respectively; jury's still out on whether her family will be dipping into their newly acquired inheritance to pay for any of it.) Thea smiles leans her forehead into Lel's—the reach, a courtesy of the heels she was talked her into wearing this evening.
Reminded, suddenly, that her right hand is empty of both drink and a tan hand, Thea asks: "Where's Josie?"
The two have grown necessary to her sanity since The Bad Years. Despite being blithely hands/lips/all with each other, company be damned, their presence has never left her feeling any absence of love. Thea had secured Leliana's friendship back when she had the ability to tell people why she liked them. Josie, she hadn't expected to warm to easily. Thea approached the day Leliana brought the young heiress to the cafe—frequented enough then that the couple that owned the place would simply nod when they'd stepped in—with an air of something reserved for Lel's typical brand of lovers. Josie, for the better, proved to be better at disarming than Thea ever has been at discerning; any red flags she should have picked up lost as the air-reserved-for-Lel's-typical-brand-of-lovers.
Lel yells over the music, "she is gone to change into shorter heels so she can dance."
Thea pulls back enough so Leliana can see her say, excuses. Lel takes a moment more for understanding to shape her eyes upwards.
The two met in undergrad, at an intro to ballet class they both needed for their art electives. The class (they learned this four weeks into it) would focus primarily on theory and the basics of movement. Bored out of their minds trying to study for its final that year, Lel and Thea drank six cans of spiked Antivan coffee each and watched videos to learn the arabesque lift.
Thea takes some steps back. When Leliana nods her ready, Thea steps between Lel's open arms, laughing when she's lifted several inches less than what they managed in their younger days. They break their version of the lift—as it turns out, two cannot learn a complex dance move in a night—at Josie's return.
With eyes/darts directed at them both simultaneously somehow, Josie says through a smile, "Not at our wedding. I will not have a bride injured!" Then to just Thea when she catches her drawn lips: "Nor any associated events!"
Thea moves to remind Josie the inflection in her tone has a way of giving her away and that really, they can just modify the move to include her, until she's interrupted by a tap on her shoulder. A cursory scan in the vicinity confirms Solas is not where she last saw him straight ahead. Lel and Josie exchange a look. Thea braces herself for the inevitable encounter—polite small talk, awkward pauses, all the best features of a conversation with someone you went from talking to everyday to not at all.
But she turns to find Alistair standing there with his clipped smile and nerves wearing his eyes and she purses her lips into her smile to fight her body's disappointment. This is enough to allow his shoulders to yield some and the slight sigh of relief the beautiful boy is unable to hide touches her with guilt for inviting him here at all. (In his place, she'd've been a nightmare had he ditched her to chat up repulsive strangers for more than a split second.)
"Hi," she says. Alistair returns it.
The vitiligo first began at the base of Thea's skull, and before it turned her whole head of hair not-quite-grey-not-quite-white, it caused flakes to crust off when she scratched the back of her neck. Once, when she finished scratching, a small hair returned with her hand. Beside her, third-year-of-undergrad Alistair, was lost to seemingly riveting online discourse on why it should be fine for humans to call elves knifeears or rabbits if humans are also on the receiving end of name calling (no body likes to be called a quick-child!). Thea stared at the translucent strand in her hand trying to make of its source, found a longer one stuck to her maroon sweater—Alistair's, she was wearing it—and compared the two. The not-quite-grey-not-quite-white one was decidedly hers. Much thicker. She voiced her concerns—aging, stress, her family's track record of having internal organs that implode suddenly—to Alistair, but he, naturally, assumed she was all of a sudden interested in the thread he had spared her from till that moment. She can't remember exactly what it was he said, just that the remark on the topic was starkly neutral. Her answer was a question that should have helped lead him to an opinion, ideally aligned with her own.
Alistair, with his eyes narrowed just so in thought, stared at her for an second or so before, "Sorry, I missed that. You're just so beautiful."
This worked for her then. (Now, stood before her, Alistair gives her a similar smile. Thea hopes its growth or self-actualization that it doesn't have the appeal it once did.)
Lel was a theatre major. The three of them would spend the minutes between their lectures arguing aphorisms Lel would learn from the plays she studied. Alistair was possibly the only reason Lel—ever the romantic—and Thea—who lavished in attempting to strip the rosy veneer off her then-roommate's cat-eye glasses—are friends today. The rare few words Alistair managed in these conversations had a way of settling tempers and offering both the other's perspective. A part of Thea valued this trait.
Alistair offers his hand and Thea takes it. Something old and upbeat plays and as alcohol and her dance partner's pine warmth rushes her system, she begins to forget that she had any gripes with him in the first place.
But pine-warmth becomes honeyed when Alistair, head turned slightly so his breath warms the tips of Thea's ears, says: "I'll talk to the partners. I'll have more pull in three months."
He didn't outgrow his jejune sentiments on life and love when Thea did. Or he never learned to consider them juvenile. This, then, proved her hesitancy to become the sappy fool he longed for her to be sound. In their third year of law, Alistair met the true blue-eyed girl of his dreams. Human. A perfect blushing thing. Smarter than Thea ever gave her credit for. Thea was happy for him, truly. (The drunken shit-talking about how predictable it was of him to go for someone so safe had more to do with Thea's general disposition than her feelings for him.) She was happy for herself too—Solas had forced through the cracks of her carefully cemented walls only a few months prior.
The wrinkles on her hand, currently rested on Alistair's left shoulder, smooth to her memory's timeline for a moment or an eternity: a decade ago, she held Solas' shoulder at a distant friend's wedding and they were arguing over something pointless as they often did during The Bad Years. She wonders if time travel, if it's real, is like this—presence forcing the body to relive stark memories the mind has repressed but cannot completely wipe from the skin.
Fleeting, but the traces of the pinch in her chest remain, charged now by the pity she finds in Alistair's eyes.
She pulls her hands, sticky with sweat then and now and lets them drop to her side. She knows her face is tight from the sharp pain along the lower left side of her brow. "I am not your project."
Sighing, Alistair says, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't use me to assuage your guilt—I'm not some pathetic rat you were gracious enough to elevate to your ranks."
"Thea, I don't understand what this has to do with what I just said. Or anything."
Truthfully, nor does she. More than likely, nothing. But Thea is not one to admit to an inflated ego, especially when it's wounded. Plus, she's on a roll: "Not even you are obtuse enough to believe the promotion was all merit and not at all the influence of your father."
Alistair has tensed, possibly in an effort to distance himself from her as much as he physically can without alerting anyone around them of his discomfort. Maybe. Or she's projecting her perpetual need to maintain decorum onto Alistair—not one for knowing nor caring about how he's perceived.
"Why did you ask me to come?" is an accusation. A rightful one.
"Good fucking question." Thea draws her lips into a smile of sorts as she steps around him towards the restroom. And because she has decided Alistair is a complete moron, she turns to add: "That was an invitation to leave whenever you want to, love."
His face sinks and Thea's stomach twists in momentary guilt. Her eyes flick to Lel, eavesdropping and at the ready behind him, and she gives a nod to leave him to her. Thea tries not to think too hard on the fact that she'll never deserve a friend like her.
The walk to the restroom is easier this time because the music with the heavy off-beat bass is drowning out her click-clacking heels. (Been long enough since she last bought a new pair that she has forgotten about having to break them in.) The built in news app of her cellphone is feeding her junk she has no use for. She doesn't click on the ads that are getting really good at looking like articles, and still her device has learned she has been consuming an unhealthy amount of trashy daytime television. Witchcraft—Solas was always on about how magic was a life force once—and not the fact that she slows down to read every headline about the morbid lives of the cast members.
A notification showing Morrigan's partial response to Thea's text from earlier—Don't waste your time on being shocked by this outcome—cuts her scroll. Shouldering the door into the restroom open, Thea chuckles, glad at Morrigan for being somehow meaner than she is.
She doesn't get to responding. On the floor of the restroom is a striking woman with Dalish markings around one eye. Her camera bag is wide open and she has emptied it completely, its contents laid out on the pristine marble floor.
"I thought the door was locked," she says and it comes out tired. Thea spots the dark pooling under the woman's eyes—doesn't know her to know if it's just running liner and mascara or exhaustion or all three. They stare at one another for a moment and Thea flips through her remaining options beyond this door. She could go outside for a while, stare at the sea.
The decision to leave the woman to her crisis, however, fizzles when a helpless huff mixes with a tug of the woman's brows. Thea tries the lock again, tests to confirm it won't open again before joining the woman on the floor.
Written by a human in Ellipsus.