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In the day, the first view from her balcony never fails to steal her breath. Sun against snow makes a dazzling display, glinting white secrets on mountains that make a shame of whatever greatness Skyhold aspires to. There is no illusion that any of this belongs to her, and it’s even clearer by night when the absence of light swallows everything into a harsh darkness, save for the stars. The air is too crisp for any pretense that Ellana can create that this is forest, again, though what is above is familiar and a fire crackles behind. When she turns back into her room it is once again too large, too much washed and polished, too many sheets.
She doesn’t undress for bed because she doesn’t understand the softness of linen against her skin. It’s more comforting, somehow, the smell of leather pressed against her pillows as she tries, with as much valor as she possesses on the battlefield, to go to sleep. But then there’s a step on her balcony, a soft twist of fade-green, and she sits up to find Cole there.
“Cole,” she squints up at him - even from this distance it’s clear he’s shivering. And the wonder of that almost makes her gasp, “you're… you’re, uh, cold.”
“It rose inside you, like the tip of a carpet. A flick of a laugh. Why?”
She allows herself the full smirk as she shifts on the bed, making room for him. He hesitates, gaze downcast and darting as always before he shuffles forward. “It’s a pun. A… play on words. One word sounds similar to another, so when it’s uttered, it's… funny.”
“Like a joke?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Love sounds like leaf. Did I do it?”
“It’s… more a rhyme.” Half-rhyme, actually, but she doesn’t have the heart to correct him in such detail. “But just as lovely. Come on. I’ll tuck you in.”
Cole is still tentative as he perches on the edge of the bed, and it’s another long moment before he swings his booted feet onto the sheets. Ellana doesn’t mind at all, only draws the blankets carefully over him and across his shoulders while he lies down like a cadaver, arms clapped to his sides. He watches her face, though, and the memory he’s found in there makes him relax.
“Hurry, before Keeper Deshanna sees, just for a little while. They are warm. They smell of, sweat, hair of halla, the same soil, not so different from you, but sweeter than leather and pelt. Big sister. Little mother. Hush. Can we have a little flame?” He’s reached out a finger to touch the smile on Ellana’s face. “Why can’t she see? We are not doing what must be done behind doors.”
“We’re supposed to be self-reliant. So the younger ones in our clan have to sleep out under the stars, every night, all by themselves.” Not nearly smothering the Keeper’s tiny First with their giggles and the weight of their bodies as they beg, in whispers, for magic and stories. “It’s how I learned, too. Keeper Deshanna is… strict.”
“Must Cole leave now? Be alone to grow?”
“No, no. Of course not. Not always. It's… it’s people who made you real, isn’t it? We need people, sometimes. A lot of the time.”
Cole shifts in the covers, as unused to this plush softness as she once was. “You’re not angry anymore,” he says, sad and knowing, and this time it’s her who averts her gaze. “You’ve a hole inside you and it grew bigger. Bigger than this room. Or the sky…”
Because, in this strange, drafty place she had to learn to sleep in, an elf once kissed her enough to make her understand that home, as she once thought it was, is no longer a place she can simply return to. Because the gulf between them now is the same as the distance between her throne and those kneeling for judgment, between her quarters and the rest of the company, as large and as cold as the rest of this fortress.
“Cole. Can you tell me…” That ‘old pain from before’ that he saw. But the shadows in Cole’s face tell her the wrongness of what she has been about to ask. And if Solas never meant her to know, then it is a rejection more absolute than anything she could have done. “No. Never mind.”
He scoots closer then to tap his forehead softly against hers, his closeness more straw than grass, but real and warm and solid nonetheless. Ellana pulls the blankets snug over them and they hold each other, as children, against emptiness, grateful for the small spaces that make one human.