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She woke screaming.
Her dream, if that’s what that even was, danced behind her eyelids as she squeezed them shut, trying to rid herself of the image of Hawke in the Fade.
The cavernous space of her quarters at Skyhold loomed above her, the ceiling far away. It shouldn’t feel claustrophobic, but it did. She was Dalish , for fuck’s sake, a sense of open space around her shouldn’t bother her, but perhaps that was the problem. It wasn’t the open sky and sails of an aravel that she had grown up with, but a barrier, something cutting her off from the stars. When they were out on a mission, she almost always elected to sleep without a tent, except in the harshest of conditions.
Lavellan pulled the blankets up around her shoulders, a chill winding its way down her back. It was late autumn and Skyhold was high in the mountains, a cold place even at high summer.
She had returned to Skyhold only a few hours earlier, exhausted out of her mind after nearly six weeks of hard campaigning. It had been dark when they arrived, and despite the gate guard’s insistence that he had to announce their arrival , she had wanted none of the fanfare that went with that. It could all be dealt with in the morning when she wasn’t ten seconds away from collapsing onto her face.
So she had stumbled up the stairs to her quarters after slipping through the thankfully-deserted great hall, and barely managed to kick her boots off before falling into bed. As it was, she realized she still wore her armor, and her sheets were probably none the better for it. Lavellan stood, and groaned as she reached up to pull the locking pins of her armor out, sore and stiff muscles complaining every bit of the way. She managed to get the right shoulder unpinned, but her other arm was simply too tired to reach that far.
Her teeth ground together as she fought back tears of frustration. The few hours she had gotten of sleep hadn’t helped much with the exhaustion, and she was on the edge of a crying jag she knew would last hours.
Deep breaths, Ceri, she heard her mother’s voice say. They had had much the same temperament, and as a teenager, Ceridwen had possessed a rather volatile disposition. She sucked in a breath, and slowly let it out. One thing at a time. She couldn’t undo her armor, and it was unlikely that she would be able to fall asleep with it on again. She needed to get someone’s help to get it off. Moreover, she didn’t particularly want to be alone right now.
She considered her options, briefly, but it wasn’t really a choice. Before Halamshiral, maybe, the decision would’ve been harder, but now, no. Shoving the locking pin she had removed into a belt pouch, Lavellan reached for her boots. She didn’t bother fastening them very tightly, just enough that she wouldn’t trip over the laces. Her cloak was slumped drunkenly over a chair, and she swirled it around her shoulders. It was bitingly cold outside, even if she would only be out of doors for a few moments.
She crept down the stairs, listening for the sounds of early morning activity in the great hall, but it was blessedly empty as she stole through it. If she had been less exhausted, Lavellan would have used her stealth abilities, but even the thought of it had her wavering on her feet at the moment. The few doors between the great hall and the rampart she was seeking seemed to creak as loud as a dragon’s roar as she opened them. The eerie blue glow of Solas’ veilfire torch cast strange shadows in the otherwise dark room, and she hurried through.
The wind sliced through her woolen cloak, even as she clutched it tightly around herself, and she ran the few dozen yards between doors. The guards on the ramparts apparently took no notice of her passage, something that should have worried her, but that could be dealt with in the morning as well. The moon was full, and cast a stark light across Skyhold’s courtyard.
She eased the door to Cullen’s office open rather more slowly, praying it wouldn’t squeak. It didn’t, and she pressed it closed just as quietly. And then she saw the ladder. It hadn’t entered into her equation that she would have to climb such a tall ladder, but there wasn’t anything to be done for it now. Lavellan sucked a deep breath, and hauled herself up the ladder.
It was less tiring than she had thought, and she was up it in a matter of moments. It was only as she alit on the upper floor of the tower that she considered that Cullen might not even be here. The thought passed out of her head as soon as she saw rumpled blonde curls on his pillow, his face illuminated by moonlight that slanted through the hole that was still somehow in the roof of his tower.
She took a step forward, and the floorboard creaked under her foot. All at once, Cullen was awake. He moved faster than she would’ve thought possible for someone who had been dead asleep seconds before, but apparently soldier’s training never left a person. He had a dagger in his hand, and then at her throat as he slammed her into the wall, his free arm braced across the front of her shoulders to hold her in place, knee between hers, ready to take her feet out if she so much as twitched.
Morning would make her realize how stupid it had been for her to sneak up here as quietly as she had, but exhaustion made her reasoning muzzy, and the crying jag she had staved off earlier burst forth, her emotional walls crumbling at the sudden unexpected attack.
Cullen’s tense posture relaxed almost immediately as he found himself pinning a crying elf to a wall. He didn’t drop his dagger, he was too well trained for that, but he did set it down on the nearby side table, and pushed back the hood of her cloak. Her face was smudged with trail dust, and the tears carved tracks through it.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
She blubbered something through her tears that he didn’t understand, only a few words made it through, the Champion of Kirkwall’s name, something about her armor, and something else about the sky.
“Take a deep breath, darling,” he said. He had seen his fair share of hysterical people in his life. Many mages were prone to histrionics if they were allowed to extend themselves beyond their physical limits, and often the best way to calm them down was to simply let them cry.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, and managed to tamp the tears down, though it was only a momentary respite, she knew.
“That’s better,” he said, his deep voice rumbling through her chest with their proximity. “Now, why are you sneaking around Skyhold in the dead of night?”
“‘m tired,” she said. “Couldn’t get my armor off, had a nightmare…” she trailed off.
He wanted the rest of the story, but he could see the deep purple circles under her eyes, even through the dust and swollen redness from her crying. He could get it in the morning.
“Do you want me to help you get the armor off?” he asked, already reaching for the fastening of her cloak.
She nodded, and he set the heavy woolen garment aside, then considered her armor. It was different than his, but the design wasn’t unfamiliar, and it only took him a few moments to find the locking pin she hadn’t been able to pull out. The backplate and the breastplate came apart after that, and he gently removed them, putting them on the table with her cloak. The rest of her armor was easier to remove, greaves, and the peculiar leg pieces that she had found on an ancient schematic.
Soon she stood before him, still leaning against the wall, in just her armor’s underpadding, which was filthy from travel dust. She swore softly to herself for not grabbing something clean to wear, and Cullen tipped a hand under her chin, tilting her face up to his.
“It’s all right, you can wear one of my shirts,” he said, undoing the clasps of her underpadding.
It wasn’t anything even remotely erotic, but it felt intensely intimate. So many people saw her as only The Herald or The Inquisitor, even her own companions saw her as Lavellan, their leader, but here, here was someone who saw her as simply… Ceridwen, just herself. Of course, he knew her titles, he had given one of them to her, but… still. It was nice. She sighed, and could feel the overwhelming force of her exhaustion threatening to claim her again, but couldn’t give into it just yet.
He had her out of her underpadding and in just her smalls (those, thankfully, had been able to be washed at the last camp, and were as close to clean as anything she owned at the moment) before she really noticed, and stepped away. He guided her, still on shaky legs, to the side of the bed, where she sat down heavily.
She wavered a bit, leaning toward his pillow, but he stopped her with one hand, the other holding a damp cloth as he knelt in front of her.
“I’ll just wash your face,” Cullen said. “The rest can wait.”
She nodded mutely, and he swiped the soft towel across her cheeks, wiping the dirt away as efficiently as he could. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a shirt, offering it to her. It nearly swallowed her, the cuffs of the sleeves falling over her hands.
He stood, and quickly walked around the bed, sitting down more fully on it, holding his arm out, an invitation. Ceridwen leaned forward, slumping into his chest, her face pressed into the crook of his neck.
“I missed you,” she said after a moment, and then the fountain of tears opened once more. She sobbed for everything she had lost, friends and family, for everything she hadn’t been able to save, and for the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders.
Cullen didn’t say anything, merely wrapped his arm around her, pulled her closely, and let her cry. Some time later, it might have been as much as an hour, the tears finally ceased. He reached to his nightstand for a goblet of water, and offered it to her. She took it gratefully, dehydrated by the crying, and then drained it. He filled it twice before she shook her head.
“Thank you,” she said. “And I’m sorry.”
“No,” he said. “Don’t be sorry. You’re carrying a great deal, and if you need this, I’m more than willing to be here for you. Now, you need to get some sleep. No one knows you're here, though I suspect they’ll find out quickly when Bull eats half of the breakfast table. They’ve been saving a lot with him gone, you know.”
That brought a shaky laugh out of her, and she snuggled more firmly into his chest. He pulled the blankets up around them, and Ceridwen looked up at the sky through the hole in the roof. It was just shading toward dawn, but she could still make out the stars.
An open sky.
She slept easily.