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The night is a deep black fringed with far-off purples that hold the tall peaks of the mountains surrounding Skyhold. Arravir steps, barefoot, onto the cool stone of the balcony, and her footfalls are light, weight perched on the balls of her feet. A thin blanket is draped over her shoulder, rippling in the open currents of air.
Cullen is exactly where she thought he might be, against the stone wall just beside the doorway back into her quarters, but it does not mean she is ready for how small he looks. Despite the strength held in his arms, his frame, there is something so withdrawn about him that makes her forget his actual size. Legs drawn up to his chest, forehead drawn down to his knees, blond curls falling out of their tidy shape...if she did not know better, she might think him praying. And maybe he is. But there is pain contorting his brow, different from the kind that comes with spiritual petition.
If he has noticed her, he has not shown it. This is not the first time the withdrawals have taken him far away from her. And this is not the first time he has excused himself, for air or solitude or the wish of not being a burden.
Their relationship is still new, still treading unknown ground everyday for the both of them. Each step forward they have looked at each other, the path ahead, and at each other again for the approval in their eyes. They have done nothing except share a bed in the most innocent sense of the phrase, and even that is a thrill all on its own. She has woken before to his tired eyes staring at her own face intently, hands light and admiring as they trace her jaw, the swooping vallaslin across her cheek, the slight pout of her lips. More than once in these mornings she has kissed the pads of his fingers. A long time would pass before either of them would say a word.
Arravir does not doubt that days like that will come again, but today she has woken from the haunt of some screeching, clawing memory to an empty bed. She had blinked a few times, breathing in and out and gripping an edge of the sheet in one hand. With the other, she had tapped the mattress beside her, wondering if she had imagined his presence that night. But the space remembered him; there was still some warmth there mingled with the smell of him.
Outside, she slowly lowers herself beside him. Crossing her legs, the stone is cool and slightly dusty beneath her thighs. He still does not stir, but Arravir knows better than to touch him. So she sits beside him, posture straight and resolute against the wall behind her. Staring through the gaps in the ancient railing of the balcony, she ponders the snowy peaks that seem to glow in the darkness. The stars shift ever so slightly above them. A wind picks up somewhere from the West, and she draws the blanket tighter around her, but otherwise does not react, lost in thought. Beside her, he lets out a gasping breath, chest heaving with effort, as if he had been holding it in for some time. He lifts his head slightly, wipes the back of his hand against his sweaty brow and stares out for a moment before pressing his head to his knees again.
A loose melody floats up, perhaps a drunken song from the tavern. But her mind is so cold, still drenched in some childhood fear from her dreaming that the distant mirth does not move her.
She is picking out constellations, remembering the stories for each of them that she had begged out of the hahren dozens and dozens of times over the years. Some of them, she knows from her travels and asking her companions, have different stories among the humans, and sometimes among different countries. There is one she spots, “Bellitanus” Dorian had called it, or “The Maiden” as Varric had corrected with a shake of his head. It was of a woman, and who exactly she was changed according to who you asked, the two of them had informed her together. Arravir wonders who Cullen was taught that it was, and who he thinks the woman is now, if he thinks of the stars in that way at all. Maybe she will ask him sometime.
She wants books on the stars, their tales, the movement of them. There aren't many such books in Skyhold’s library, but surely Dorian or Vivienne would know where to look if she asked --
“Arra?” His voice is quiet, hoarse. She jumps slightly before turning to see him looking at her as if he is deciding whether or not she is real.
Mouth turning up slightly, she nods. Then, realizing he might need more than that, she says, “I’m here, Cullen.”
There is a pause as he looks at her, confusion and guilt knitting his brow. “I'm sorry for waking you.” He straightens up as well, wincing slightly as he forces himself to fake normalcy.
Blinking, she shakes her head fervently, shifting slightly on the wall to face him better. “Already awake.”
He lets out another shaky breath, staring down at his hands, toying with each other restlessly in his lap. “Nightmares?”
Even now, he knows her. She nods, forgetting he is not looking at her before clearing her throat and whispering “Yes.”
Then he does look up, worry shining through the fatigue of his expression. “Is there anything I can do?”
Arravir feels her face soften and shoulders slump slightly, struck still for a moment at the concern he has for her in the middle of one of his own bad nights. “Just…” she trails off, then shifts her arm closer to him, palm laying open as it rests on her leg, “hold my hand?”
He does.
She does not say anything about the slight tremble to his grasp, the faltering in the strong arm as his thumb rubs circles across the back of her own smaller, darker hand. Arravir closes her eyes, a smile just barely pulling at her lips. Squeezing his hand gently, she tries to say every big and little thought that her tired brain can’t articulate: words of comfort, thanks, sadness, regret, but, above all, strength. As much as she hates these moments of vulnerability, choking on shame like bile in her throat, she knows her own strength was built over decades of moments like this, guiding herself through the night with each next breath. Too many of these times were spent alone; neither of them have to be anymore.
Glancing over at Cullen, she sees his eyes shut, tension still tight in his brow as his head is tilted back and upwards against the wall behind him. His mouth is moving, but no sound is coming out. Eyes not leaving his face, she raises their entwined hands, both of them shaking now, and presses her lips to his knuckles. He replies with a squeeze of her hand and another strained exhale.
Minutes pass as they settle with both of their hands held tight to her chest, rising and falling with her breathing. She always runs hot, and Cullen's hand is comfortingly cooler in her grasp even with what is likely a slight fever. Old calluses are still rough on his palms despite over two years spent instructing the proper grip of swords more than swinging one himself.
There is something about the night winds tousling his loose curls that seems to be comforting to him. She had asked him about the hole in his roof one night weeks before while they laid in his bed, her arm across his middle. He had paused for a lengthy amount of time before voicing an incomplete thought about how there are more critical ways to expend people's’ time and resources.
A few days later, he had continued his answer unexpectedly to her over dinner in his office, as if no time had passed at all. Expression thoughtful, slightly distant, he had admitted that barracks can be confining in a way that you forget that there is anything to be seen, to be felt in the night sky. She understood, in her way. He kept the gap there because he could, and because there was something to look up to on nights when his body seemed to choke and waste away on itself. Perspective.
Arravir had said pointedly then that that was all many mages wished for: the option to sleep under the open sky. When they had first met, that would have blown into an argument. Now, though imperfect, though still wrestling with a lifetime of indoctrination, he listened to her, often conceded to her points. He defended mages to his questioning troops and sent those without bias to protect refugee mages seeking asylum in Skyhold. To her question then, he had looked taken aback, on the edge of speech multiple times before she had added,
“That is all that I want. Truly.”
“Arravir, I believe you,” he had said, fondness coloring his quiet words.
“Try to believe it of other mages.” Her reply had been immediate, unyielding but not malicious. Slowly, she had reached across his desk and put her hand on top of his.
“I...I do now,” his voice had been barely above a whisper, amber eyes gentle in his gaze that never left her face. Words stronger, he returned, “Or I am starting to.”
She had not asked more of him then. She believed him, believed in him. He was not the same man she had met in Haven more than two years before. Cullen was challenging himself through his growth now, and was enduringly patient with her as she confronted her own failings and the ghosts that haunted her own being, weighed down each breath. That sentiment, it was so simply, strangely, wonderfully true: she believed in him.
And she believes in the man he is beside her now, just barely stitching himself back together in the dark of the night, cutting out the hardness, the twisted songs, the bright blue claws in his chest. How badly her free hand aches then to press her fingers to her face, to soothe the tightness in his brow.
Instead, she untangles herself from him and stands, pulling the blanket around her again. Cullen opens his eyes, confused for a moment before sitting forward, bracing his arms on either side of him as if he is about to stand.
“No, no, it's-- ” Arravir whispers, fingertips ghosting his shoulder as she passes around him towards the door. “I'm just getting water.”
She retrieves two glasses and fills them from a pitcher she keeps on her desk just inside the doors. The moonlight casts deep, dramatic shadows around her quarters, geometric patterns cutting starkly against the floor from the various ornate windows. A single brazier is lit still by the bed, which catches her attention in all of its disorder, crumpled sheets and down comforter kicked towards the foot (Josephine had new beddings available every time she returned to Skyhold it seemed, as if it were a mission to her to test endlessly until Arravir had the best night's sleep of her life).
Slipping back out onto the balcony, she hums slightly in the back of her throat to announce her reappearance. Bending down, she places a glass beside him and watches him slowly take it.
Still standing, she leans against the wall beside him, perched on the balls of her feet like she is about to break out into either a run or a dance. A breeze tickles her cheek with her wild mane of hair as she drinks from her own glass. The chill of it spreads down her spine for a moment, and she tries to forget that in a week she will be departing again for the icy plains of the Emprise du Lion. On returning from her first trip there, the frozen landscape had seemed to carry back with her the whole way, shivering even as she rode through the main gates to Skyhold, teeth chattering behind chapped lips.
The wind itself is not harmful tonight, it just feels like some teasing reminder of the sheer size of Thedas and the forces of the world they are responsible for -- no, that they have chosen to help.
Perspective.
At least out here there is a sky with scattered shards of light the whole world makes pictures in, ascribes stories and greatness to. At least the earth itself is not the wide, cloying grandeur of the room behind them. The stars are in different planes of the sky, and the mountains are different, more grey and sheer-faced than those of the Free Marches, but it still reminds Arravir of hundreds of nights with her clan, of falling asleep to flickering firelight dancing warmly in bright poppy orange on the canopy of leaves that framed the stars above them.
Sleeping beneath the stars because they could . Finishing her last sip of the water, she drops the blanket from her shoulders, hearing it hit the stone with a slight huff as she wordlessly hops through the door again. Discarding her empty glass on her desk, Arravir makes her way to the bed - her bed, something she is still struggling to understand - and tugs the comforter free from the places it still sticks under the mattress. Her first few conscious weeks in Haven, the layers of bedding had confused Arravir, and she had no idea which layer of blanket or sheets to sleep under. She had watched servants, nervous that they were being inspected, make and unmake the bed until she could do it herself.
This comforter is of finer make than the lumpy one at Haven, or so Josephine had said, and Arravir believed her; it was an almost velvety material stuffed with feathers, light and airy as she drags it across the floor behind her like some kind of ridiculous train behind a noble woman's dress, with two pillows stuffed under her arms. Struggling for a moment to maneuver it through the door, she pulls the last of it through and hears it skitter slightly on the stone as it bunches up behind her.
Cullen's eyes are on her, but she does not answer right away as she drags the cloud of material to the center of the balcony, and gently brings one end of it towards the furthest point in the stone. Arravir walks to each corner, pulling it out into a large, flat square taking up more than half the space between the two double doors. Placing the pillows side by side at the top, she drops then too, legs crossing beneath her and positioning her back to the jagged outline of mountain ridges.
“Sleeping under the open sky,” is all she says, knowing he understands, as she gestures somewhat awkwardly beside her, that she also means to say like we both want.
Cullen rubs a hand across his eyes and lets it rest on his temple, leaning forward slightly. A smile twitches across his tired features. He gets to his knees and picked up the blanket she had discarded when she retrieved the comforter. Slowly, he bundles it in his arms, smooth fabric spilling over, and stands. Waving at her dismissively when she makes to stand as well, arms already reaching out to support him, he takes the few steps from the stone to the makeshift bed she has laid out for them. Cullen takes a deep breath as he lowers himself once more so they are sitting just beside each other again. She glances at him, his pale skin slightly washed out in the moonlight, some shadows falling beneath his eyes and all the hardened angles of his face. Stubble slightly thicker as it had been unshaven for a couple days now, but it isn't disorderly or unkempt.
Arravir feels a weary smile grow as a slight weight presses on her shoulders. He has leaned over to wrap the blanket around her shoulders, hands lingering. Cullen prefers the fresh wind of mountain air, uncovered after long days in full armor. But he knows how she hates the cold, how it bites at her. One hand trails down the outline of her arm, and her smile grows. How happy she is to be with him in the silent moments, with his remembrance of her comfort.
Before long they are laying on their sides, facing each other. Her long dark hair trails out over the pillow behind her in waves, the blanket is still tight around her, legs pulled up close to her body. This close, she can see the honey hue of his eyes she loves so much, how rich and rare a color they are even when he seems to be blinking just to stay awake. She reaches a hand out into the space between them, offering him to hold it again. Rather than doing so, he takes it in his own and guides it to his face. The roughness of it is still surprising to her palms, and she runs her thumb over his cheekbone and the slight dampness lingering there -- sweat or tears or both. He turns his head ever so slightly and kisses her palm, slowly, savoring.
At that, Arravir shifts her body closer to his, and her fingers reach for the thick curls of his hair as she pulls his head to her chest. His arm wraps around her waist as his hand settles on the small of her back. His breath is warm against the soft skin of her neck and chest. As she strokes his hair, pushing back the ringlet that falls over his ear and smoothing it back from his temple, he stills in a way that she knows he is sleeping.
Closing her eyes, holding and held by him, she lets herself drift away beneath the starry sky as well, knowing that the place of dreams -- his Fade, her Beyond -- can only take her so far away from him.