Work Text:
You do not pretend to understand this Tabris girl. She is a mass of contradictions, as you have found most people to be. She is all lean muscle and hard angles, her jaw a sharp curve and her eyes bright but deadly. The first time you met her you had thought her slender, but after Ostagar, when you see her body without layers of armor, you correct yourself. She is wiry, and her build speaks of hunger you have never known. She is all thin arms and sharp elbows, but she is strong. Humans do not seem to notice her strength, or perhaps they overlook it, but from the moment you saw her, you recognized the power in the way she holds herself. She does not stand like a warrior, but like a snake: muscles coiled in anticipation, ready to lash out with two sharp fangs at the slightest provocation, and then slink back to safety, back to a bouncing pose with her weight on the balls of her feet, daggers at the ready.
The first bite, your mother told you once, is often just a warning. The venom comes with the second.
Still, you think there is no reason to risk a snake’s ire. You would rather it not bite at all. You think about this as you stare across camp to the second fire, where she sits with her feet on her dog and Alistair speaking to her, too far away for you to make out their words, but he looks solemn, just as he has looked since meeting you. Tabris nods along with what he’s saying, but you cannot help but think she casts a glance or two your way.
*
“I named him Fen’Harel,” she tells you with a broad smile that first night at camp. She sits in front of the campfire on a half-rotten log, her legs splayed out in front of her with her hound between them. She pets his head lovingly, and he pants cheerfully in response. You are not entirely sure where he came from, but Alistair explains that Tabris saved the mabari at Ostagar. (You are fuzzy on the details now, but in years you will know them by heart. They will make you smile sometimes, when you see a dog on the street and remember the two of them. They will make you sad at the same time.) She continues, “Do you know about Fen’Harel, Morrigan? He’s—”
“The trickster god of the Dalish elves, yes,” you say, and it is everything in your power not to roll your eyes. Mother told you stories, about a god who loosed an arrow that fell in time to save the children of a village, but too late to save their parents. You remember stories of gods sealed away in the heavens. You remember that Fen’Harel scares away spirits, but is himself said to be afraid of dogs. “Why name your hound after such a character?”
“He’s called the Dread Wolf,” she says, and when you show no signs of immediate understanding, she continues, “and he’s a dog, right?” She pats his broad chest, and he gives an affectionate whuff. Your lip curls up in distaste at the ropes of drool hanging from his jowls, but she grins like a child.
“You consider this an apt comparison? Do you know nothing of the Dread Wolf? The Dalish say he turned on his own kin. I doubt you want your dog to follow too closely in his namesake’s footsteps.”
She seems confused for a moment, but masks it quickly behind a scowl. “I want him to be wild,” she says, “and fierce. I want him to hurt people who deserve it.” She is looking past the dog, into the fire, when she says this. She is not talking about the dog, you think. She is talking about herself. There is an implacable ache in your chest at this realization. You believe it to be irritation.
“Perhaps ask the bard to tell you some stories,” you snap. “Maybe she can enlighten you regarding your hound’s namesake.” You stalk off to your own campfire, the dog whining behind you.
This is the first time you worry about her. It will not be the last.
*
You are hard to impress. You pride yourself on this, on being able to smile condescendingly at any man’s advances not because you are wearing a mask of indifference, but because you are genuinely underwhelmed by his feats.
The first time you watch the Warden near-singlehandedly slay a Revenant, you are suitably impressed. Perhaps more than impressed. You are certainly not underwhelmed, if your fast-beating heart and the curious knot in your gut is any indication.
The word you use for Tabris is spindly. She reminds you of the cattails that grew in the marshes, brown and lean, so thin a good wind should be able to break them, but instead they turn willowy, become flexible, flow around obstructions.
This is how she fights the Revenant.
Between casting an ice spell for Sten and a barrier for Alistair, you see her approaching the Revenant, and you have enough knowledge of them that a genuine thrill of ice-cold fear runs up your spine. You paralyze the behemoth as she leaps for it, but you can only hold the spell for a moment, only long enough for her to get in three good backstabs. The demon spins to face her, and your heart is in your throat as she ducks under its sword, sidestepping so she is once again behind it, and stabs again. It will be slow work killing it like this, and Sten and Alistair are occupied across the field. You cannot keep one eye on her and the other on them. You are feeling increasingly more panic as you realize this.
You watch her duck down, daggers at the ready, and bounce up from the balls of her feet. She plunges one dagger into its back (it’s huge, it’s so much bigger than her, she will never take it down on her own) and uses it to climb onto its shoulders. She drags her other dagger across its throat. It would be an admirable strategy were she facing a Qunari, or another living, breathing giant, but all she does to the corpse is anger it. You see her face contort in fear, her eyes widen, for only a moment—and then, with a snarl, she saws off its head with her dagger.
She leaps off its back and stands, covered in dark liquid which you hesitate to call blood, breathing hard, as the battle winds down around you both. Sweat drips into her eyes, and she wipes her forehead with the back of her arm and glances at you, and you feel your heart constrict in your chest for a moment.
She is beautiful, as much for her cattail body as for her raw strength. She is beautiful, and you are impressed, and you realize all at once that you do not want to hurt her. By all that is good in this world, you do not want to hurt this woman.
*
You are wasting your time in Denerim, and you make sure to tell her so. “We must confront our enemies or gather our allies,” you say. “Cutting through these bandits serves no purpose.”
She stands with four corpses at her feet, sniffing down at them disdainfully. At your words, she tosses you a glance that you can only describe as withering. This is the third street gang she has engaged today, since the guard at the alienage gate had told her no one was allowed inside.
“That’s my home,” she had told the guard. Her voice was low, and you knew the glint in her eye was fire, that her tone meant danger. The guard did not.
He scratched lazily at the stubble at his chin and said, “I wouldn’t spread that around here. Your people aren’t much liked these days. Not since the riots and the Arl’s son getting killed.”
You watched her shoulders tense, noticed the quiver in her ears. Her hands trembled. “Riots?”
The man nodded, still staring into the distance, over her head. You realized that he did not see the fire in her eyes because he had not deigned to look the Warden in the face. Your skin crawled with heat, and you found your chest tightening. She is superior to him in every way, you thought, and he cannot even imagine it. You began to see why Tabris is so angry, why humans make her hands shake, why she was so slow to trust you.
“Yeah, riots,” the man continued. “There was a proper purge a few months back, and now some kind of plague targeting elves. No great loss, I say. Alienage is crowded enough as it is.”
You saw the punch coming before he did, but you did nothing to stop her. Her small hands curled into fists, and she slugged the man in the stomach. He doubled over, gasping for air, and she grabbed his head in both of her hands and brought her right leg up to his face, slamming his nose into her knee. He was bleeding when she let go, profusely from his nose and leaking from one eye. She spat at his feet and turned, and you, Sten, and Leliana followed after her.
You would all pay for this small rebellion later, you assumed, but there was a thrill in your chest when you saw it happen. You were pleased that she had received an ounce of justice, that she had found a place to put her anger, if only a modicum of it, if only for a moment.
You do not yet know that she killed the arl’s son, that the purge of the alienage is on her shoulders. You do not yet know she could have spared him. You learn this later, from a red-headed elf who introduces herself as Tabris’s cousin. (The two could not look more dissimilar, the Warden with her brown skin and grey eyes, with the freckles spotted across her face, which you have memorized, which you have willed yourself not to kiss but cannot help but love. This woman has skin the color of parchment and fiery hair. But then they smile at each other, and you see the corners of their eyes crease in the same way, the hint of the same lips and the same lopsided grin. You see the face you love in her face, and then her sadness strikes you to the bone.) She smells of liquor, and though there are laughter lines etched around her eyes, you only see her smile once. She looks tired. She looks like it aches to move.
When you learn all this, you find that you cannot fault the Warden’s decision. Justice, you decide, is like that sometimes.
*
When you enter Dust Town for the first time, you wrinkle your nose. “I will never understand,” you say, “why the poor do not rise against their social betters. They allow themselves to suffer.”
You had said something similar at the Circle Tower, and there too, Tabris had fixed you with a gaze you couldn’t quite describe. It had come close to making you squirm. It had not come close to making you apologize. Here though, when you remember where she comes from, you feel the beginnings of a sorry in your throat. You do not regret the comment (it is what you believe, it is the truth), but you regret having hurt her.
“They would kill them,” she says. “You haven’t seen it. The nobles are better armed and they’ll buy out their own from under them. No one will fight the lords when the rich will throw them a couple of measly coins to kill their brothers. And then in a month the coin will be gone, and they’ll be right back here. They don’t stand a fucking chance.”
You wonder if she speaks from experience You wonder if she has seen this before. You wonder, not for the first time, how her mother died. You do not speak again.
*
In Orzammar, you watch a man try to convince her to care about Dwarven politics. He makes no convincing arguments, and you find yourself rapidly losing any respect you may have had for his people. So far, they have proven to be incapable of handling internal conflict. You think you could do a better job, and you are musing on this as you hear her sigh.
“Bhelen wants to help the people in Dust Town?” Her eyes bore into the man, hard, unforgiving. Here is the first place anyone has been threatened by her. Humans underestimate her because of her thin frame and her diminutive height (she is half a head shorter than you, eye level with most men’s chests), but the dwarves recognize her strength as soon as they see her. You do not intend to tell anyone, but this recognition was part of the respect you initially had for them, the respect that is quickly dwindling.
He blinks twice, then furrows his brows over his nose. “Yes. The Casteless.” He half-sneers it, and you see her stiffen when he does. “But he—”
“He’s the one I want,” she says curtly, and turns to head to the door he had indicated as leading to the Diamond Quarter.
“Listen to me, Warden! Bhelen is dangerous!” He follows at her shoulder, his strides long to match her speed.
She waves a hand dismissively, and you wonder whether she does it to shoo away the dwarf or the notion he put forth. “All men are,” she says. “We’re going to see Bhelen.” She ignores the man’s continued protests, and you follow her to the Diamond Quarter. She does not speak for a long time, and you tuck this piece of information about her away. Perhaps you will mention it at camp one night, tell her you agree, that she is right, that no man can be trusted. But then Alistair claps a hand on her shoulder, and you watch her back stiffen, her muscles tense, you catch the flicker of fear and anger on her face. He does not see it and launches into a discussion about maybe could we pick up some dwarven gauntlets while we’re here, or a whetstone, and I think Leliana wanted a new dagger, but you are still watching her face, which slips back to composure after a fraction of a second. You decide you will not ask her about her statement. She knows, you think, that she is right. Affirming it will do more harm to her than good.
You find yourself worried again.
*
She asks Alistair how old he is as you are pulling up camp one morning. He looks up from packing his bedroll to think for a moment, his face scrunched up in what you imagine to be an expression designed entirely to make you want to punch him. “I’m not sure how long we’ve been on the road these days,” he replies finally. “I suppose I’m twenty? Twenty-one? How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” she says. She is quiet for a moment before she turns to you. “Morrigan? How old are you?”
You snort, but don’t reply. You are nineteen years old. She does not need to know.
“I’m twenty-five,” Leliana offers, in that helpful, cheery tone of hers. No one had asked. Sten says nothing, but he has finished packing, and now stares at the rest of you, as if willing you to finish faster.
“Why do you ask, Tabris?” Alistair says. No one calls her by her first name anymore. She had introduced herself with it, the first time you had met her, but after Ostagar, it was just Tabris. Always Tabris, or the Warden. (Later she will be the Hero of Ferelden, a myth you barely recognize, a name you cannot map onto the body of the woman you love, the body you have memorized. The Hero of Ferelden is for the people, not for you. You imagine her as a separate entity, one whose moles you don’t know by heart, one whose smile you don’t ache to kiss.)
She looks at Alistair for a moment, and you barely contain a laugh as you recognize your own appraising expression spread across her face. Alistair’s smile falls to a grimace. He must have noticed it as well.
“I was just checking. Your kind gets more dangerous the older you get, you know,” she says. You can tell she was trying for nonchalance, but you detect a hint of steel in her words, an edge as dangerous as her daggers. Leliana glances at you, and you lower your head in acknowledgement. She noticed too.
“Humans?” Alistair says. You snort, and Leliana offers him a strained smile, one that cannot communicate shut up, but which is what you are thinking and, you are sure, she is thinking as well.
“Men,” Tabris says. It is quiet in the camp for a long moment, as everyone finishes folding their bed rolls. Finally, Fen’Harel nudges her shoulder and offers her a sloppy kiss on the cheek, and she cracks a smile. Leliana and Alistair laugh, and the moment of tension passes, blown away like a dark cloud by wind. You are the only one who watches her press a kiss to the hound’s velvety head, the only one who hears her whisper, “Not you, boy. I trust you.”
*
You do not know an ounce of healing magic. You never needed to learn. In the Wilds, Mother took care of any scrapes or burns for you, chastising you all the while for being careless, but healing your abrasions regardless. Not long after the incident at the tower, Wynne had offered to teach you simple healing, and you had scoffed at her.
“You never know when it may come in handy,” she had said, and you had merely tossed your head in condescension, a subtle action that nonetheless silenced her. You had been proud of yourself, in the moment, for making such short work of the conversation.
Now you wish you had learned. You wish you had been the old woman’s most dedicated and proficient pupil. You wish for anything that would stem the flow of blood. Your hands are pressed uselessly to the Warden’s bleeding thigh, Alistair and Sten above you, looking on. Useless, you think. Their only task in battle is to defend her, and they fail at even that. Completely useless.
The Warden, for her part, is silent, and you are not sure if this is because she is moments from passing out or because she is trying to seem brave. You can tell nothing from her shaky breaths besides that she is in pain.
For the dozenth time, Alistair says, “You don’t know any healing spells?”
You have no response but to yell wordlessly at him, and under you, Tabris lets out a bark of laughter before her face goes pale at the exertion. “It isn’t deep,” she had told you, but it is bleeding freely and shows no sign of stopping, no matter the pressure you put on it. It may not be deep but it runs the length of her entire thigh, and you are sure, for half a moment, that she is going to die. Your journey ends here. You have traipsed from the Frostbacks to Denerim with this woman, slain ogres and dragons, and she has been felled by a simple bandit because your warriors were distracted by his dogs. You flounder at the thought, and when the pressure of your hands lessens, she hisses in pain. You lean forward again, put all your weight on her thigh. She groans, but this time you know what you must do. You decide you will not make the rest of this journey with Alistair as your only hope.
(What you really decide in that moment is that you will not make the rest of this journey without her. You decide that fear in your chest, tearing into you, is not fear of a future where Alistair is the only chance of saving Thedas, but a fear of a future where she is not by your side. You hate it. You hate the feeling, but it remains in your chest, and so you do what you must.)
“This will hurt,” you say, and she nods. She is biting down on the leather strap of her glove when you raise your hands off her thigh. You take a deep breath.
You do not know an ounce of healing magic, but you know fire and ice like old friends, and when your hands glow hot like iron in a forge, you press them to her thigh, the fingers of one hand at the heel of the other.
She shouts and kicks with her other leg, and you close your eyes and remember the thought you had when she stood over the slain Revenant, remember thinking I do not want to hurt her, and you almost pull your hands away. But this is what you must do. You must cauterize the wound to stop the bleeding, at least until you can get to Wynne, who can heal her properly. This is all you can do.
You wonder if you have always been this way, if you have always been wrapped in destruction, destined to wound those you seek to comfort. You think of what Flemeth told you after bringing two unconscious wardens home from a battle: you have a mission. You are here for a reason.
You know in that moment you will hurt her when you tell her. You will also save her life. You will always hurt in order to heal.
*
She slips into your tent one night, and you push yourself up onto your elbows as you hear her come in. You quirk an eyebrow, and she starts babbling, spilling out more words than you have ever heard her speak at one time. “In the alienage,” she says, “I never really got involved with anyone. Everyone was my second or third cousin, or I knew their cousin, or we were family friends. I kissed a smithy’s daughter once, but that wasn’t really a thing and she was human, so I was wasting my time. Anyway, what I’m saying is I don’t really know what I’m doing.” She is stripping off her gloves, strap by strap, and pauses here to use her teeth to tug off her left one. “With you, I mean. I’m not sure what this is, and I want to let you know I’ve killed revenants, bears,” she pulls off a boot, drops it on the ground, “ogres, a broodmother, more darkspawn than I can count,” her other boot is on the ground, and she is fiddling with the straps of her armor, tugging it loose, “and I’ve been pretty afraid before, but right now, Morrigan, I am completely terrified.” She slips out of her armor and sits in front of you in a sleeveless shirt and her smallclothes, legs crossed under her, looking at you with those bright, serious eyes.
You are not sure what to say. Instead, you pat the space next to you. It is not the first time she has lain next to you, but it’s the first time she has prefaced it with this kind of talk. With much of any talk, really. Usually she slips in silently, curls up with her head near the hollow of your throat, and lays there, the two of you curled towards each other like quotation marks but not truly touching. This is fine with you. It had seemed fine with her, as well.
She crawls next to you, and lays as she always does, but after a moment, snakes her arm around your waist and shuffles up, so she is staring into your eyes. You meet her gaze, unflinching. She smells like the road, like campfire, and she is salty with sweat, and beneath all of that is the tang of metal, the smell of blood and iron that will never wash out of her hair and skin.
You watch her taste the words in her mouth for a while before she says anything. “Morrigan,” she finally breathes, “what are we doing?”
You start to say fucking, because you want her disillusioned. You do not want her to imagine you can be anything more than what you are. You know that you will leave, likely soon, and you know that if you tell her you care for her, it will hurt her. You would rather hurt her now, when you can still say you’re sorry.
Instead, you say, “I do not know.”
(It is what you say the first time Kieran asks you where his father is. You tell him I do not know, because you never expected him to ask. You are baffled by the question, but you are more baffled by the tools you have to craft an answer: you know who sired your son, but you do not know how to fit all of her into an answer he could understand. The next time Kieran asks, you tell him he does not have a father, and you picture Tabris’s face, the curve of her lips, the angle of her eyes, the freckles spattered across the top of her ears. You leave it at that. He does not ask again.)
This startles her as much as it does you, and she blinks back at you for a moment. She looks tired, you realize. A bone-deep, aching tiredness, and it makes you want to hold her, a feeling you squash with great effort, but you do raise your hand to cup her face, and you lay like that for a while, her hand on your waist, yours resting against her cheek.
“Wynne says we should stop,” she says, and bites it back immediately.
You snort. “We listen to old women, now?” You lean forward, and before you can stop yourself, you press a kiss to her lips, and she kisses back—not eagerly, not in earnest, but softly, and it is better than you have ever been kissed before. “Logan,” you say, and you taste the way your tongue curls around her name (in years to come you will be unable to say it, your mouth will not form the word, and she will be Tabris again to you), “Wynne has had every decision in her life made for her, by mages ranked higher than her. Her wisdom is repeated from greater sources. We do not need to heed her advice simply because it is offered.”
“I love you,” she says, and you see the regret in her eyes once it’s out, her grey eyes flecked with blue you never noticed before.
You mean to say it back (you will wish you said it back, it will be your biggest regret, that you could not tell her the truth in that moment) but instead you nod, and she smiles because it is as much an affirmation as anything, and you press your forehead to hers and kiss her again, and fall asleep like that, your bodies close but not touching, connected by your hands cradling each other.
When you wake the next morning, she has caught a rabbit, and she is singing blithely and badly in elvish. (She does not know all the words, but years from now you will learn them, and you will choke on tears and laughter when you learn she sang a funeral song to the rising sun.) She cooks breakfast for the camp, and Wynne does not look pleased, per se, but she offers you a smile nonetheless.
Zevran nudges your shoulder when you come out of your tent, tosses you a wink, and despite yourself you laugh. Birds chirp in the trees around you, you feel the heat of the morning sun on your shoulders, and the smell of rabbit frying in herbs floats to you on the breeze. For a moment, you almost forget the war raging around you. You forget that your time is limited, your days with her numbered, and you smile to yourself, happy and stupid with love.
This is the morning you hold onto when a duchess asks if you knew the Hero of Ferelden, and you realize you do not know the arrangement of her face anymore. You can see her eyes, her lips, the curve of her neck, but you cannot picture her face, cannot see the arrangement of the freckles you so carefully counted. You find yourself searching Kieran’s face for hers, for any hint of your Warden. You stare at him for what feels like hours, but he looks like you. Just like you.
*
On the caravan to the Landsmeet, she tells you a secret. “I’m named after him,” she says quietly, like she is afraid someone will hear. You are tucked into the back of a supply cart, loaded down with dried meats and hard tack and kegs of ale for the two-week trip from Redcliffe to Denerim. You had wanted to walk, and for a time had enjoyed the fresh air and the sun on your shoulders, but after a while, the Warden—your Warden, you think, and the thrill shoots through your stomach, equal parts delight and fear—had excused herself and slipped away. You followed shortly after into the wagon you had seen her climb into. She smiled up at you when she saw you, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
You are worried about her again.
“Beg pardon?” You say. You wonder if you missed the first half of this conversation, and you peer at her curiously, but she does not meet your eyes.
She picks at a splinter in the wagon’s floor, careful to speak to it (slowly, painfully slowly) rather than to you. “Loghain. I’m named after him. Logan,” she says, “that’s my name.”
“I know your name,” you scoff, but soften when she looks up at you. You find yourself nodding instead, the scorn melted away from you. “I had wondered if it was elven,” you say finally. “Your mother named you after a human lord? Don’t elves despise human lords? Don’t you especially despise human lords?”
She smiles ruefully up at you. “I think it was Father’s idea. He hated the Orlesians. Thought Loghain was a hero, just like the rest of us did before—well. Before.” She pauses again. You do not push her. Finally, she continues, “He was a farmer’s son, you know. Not an ounce of royal blood. No ties to nobility. King Maric gave him a Teyrnir just for being the cleverest warrior and a loyal friend. I think Father admired that. I think he wanted to give me something to live up to.”
She stares off into the distance as the wagon bumps along under you. You follow her gaze, to where Fen’Harel trails behind Sten and Alistair, the latter of whom is gesticulating wildly as he tells a story, while the former looks on, unreadable as ever, and nods infrequently. Leliana is singing somewhere, and behind you, you can pick out the sound of Zevran’s laughter, followed by Wynne’s chastising tone. You are fond of these people. You have done your best not to be, but they are good people, and for the most part worthy of respect. Your eyes slide back to the Warden, sitting in silence.
“He was a great man once,” you say. “You can aspire to live up to what that means without following in his footsteps. Or you can make a name for yourself.” You nudge her gently with your shoulder, and smile when she looks up. Her eyes are tired, but you see a grin tug at the corners of her lips. “I think you have already made a fine start on the latter.”
A laugh bubbles out of her, and you are thrilled at the sound. (It sounds like bells, light and lilting, silvery and beautiful, and in years to come you will hear it sometimes, like a phantom across a ballroom, and it will shock you into silence, and you will be forced to excuse yourself for a time, so you can collect yourself.) She presses a kiss to your cheek, and you scoff, but she laughs again, and this time you smile in response.
She does not say I love you, but you can see it at the tip of her tongue, just as you can feel it on yours.
*
She tells you about her fiancé during the Landsmeet. You are alone at last in the room Eamon gave her, carefully covered by her bedsheets. Her father, mere hours ago, had been freed from a cage. He had given her a dagger, and said it was her mother’s. She had not cried, but her hands shook when she held it. “You’re still wearing her boots,” he had said, and she had nodded. You did not know they were her mother’s, but now you understand why she had worn them twice across Ferelden, why she had taken them to a cobbler three times rather than replace them.
When you came home from the alienage, she had taken a long soak in a bath drawn for her by servants (this vexes her, you know, just as it vexes her that the elven servant in the hall would speak no more than ten words to her at a time), and then she crawled into bed early in the afternoon, when the sun was still high in the sky. You joined her, expecting her to be overjoyed at a job well done, but instead found her curled in on herself, staring at the wall. She did not move when you slid into the bed and curled your body around hers, her back to your front, and held her. You are getting better at holding her, getting better at comforting. You know it will not matter for long, but you cannot bear to stop. (You will wish later that you had held her longer. You do not know this yet.)
“You’re upset,” you say, and she takes a deep breath and launches into a story about a man who came to see her on the first day of spring and found her dressed in her fighting clothes, watched her scam a handful of drunk neighborhood boys out of sixty coppers, saw her wrestle with her cousin in the dirt and then stared at her like she had hung the stars. She says he was the first person to ever call her beautiful, and she says it scared her, that she was scared of him and the future they would have together, scared that she had no choice in the matter.
“I would have died before I married him,” she says, and she sounds honest. She sounds like she believes it. “I thought about running away to join the Dalish.” She snorts at the thought, and you remember the way they treated her in the Brecilian Forest, the surprise clear on her face when the clan of elves met her with hostility and distrust rather than welcome.
“I’m sure he was handsome,” she said, “but I couldn’t do it. And then I didn’t have to because—” She falters, and you nod behind her. She does not continue her sentence, but by this time you have pieced the story together from her cousins and father and rumors floating around Denerim. She does not need to tell you more. As far as you are concerned, she is welcome to forget it. “Anyway,” she says after a long moment, “I got him killed. He charged into the arl’s castle with my cousin, and he died, and I sold his ring before we even made it to Ostagar.” She does not sound like she regrets it, and when she says it, she fiddles with the ring you gave her. (It is carved wood and big on her finger now. She has lost weight, and you are not sure if it is the stress of the Landsmeet or the shortage of food as the Blight progresses. You worry either way.)
You say nothing, but you stay awake until her breathing evens out, until she is asleep in your arms, and then you allow yourself to drift off. She sleeps until morning, but when she wakes up, she looks no less exhausted than the night before. You watch her stretch, hear her spine pop when she twists, see her put her head in her hands and hold it there, as if she is about to explode, as if only her willpower is keeping her in one piece.
You wish she could rest.
*
You are close to tears waiting for her in the castle. You do not know what you are going to tell her. You have practiced it a thousand times, you have memorized the words, but you fear you will abandon them, and instead you will say I am a fool, I love you, I cannot let you die. Stay with me. You cannot imagine telling her you used her, telling her you never meant to care about her. The thought of her singing, a rabbit sizzling in a pan, is hot in your mind, the memory of her lips pressed to the upturned corners of your mouth weighs on you, feels like a lump of lead tied around your throat.
You do not hear her come in. She sets a hand gently on your shoulder, and you start, and just as quickly she yanks her hand back, murmurs, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to surprise you.”
You want to tell her not to apologize. You want to say you’re sorry, you’re the only one who should be sorry, but instead you stare into the fire and tell her she doesn’t need to die. You tell her about the ritual. You tell her it is as simple as laying with you, something she has done before. (Something you need her to do now, for both of your sakes, so you can feel her skin against you one more time, so you do not have to leave without a recent memory of her touch on your skin.)
You hazard a glance up, and find her staring into the fire, arms crossed over her chest. “Oh,” she says. You look away. The fire crackles. Nothing moves. “So…us,” she finally says. “What we did, that was only…to move this along.”
You want to tell her no. You want to tell her you love her. You need to tell her you love her. Instead you say, “At first,” and nothing else.
It is silent again.
“I don’t think I can,” she says, and your world crashes down, because you know she can, and she must, and you need her to. You are too proud to beg but you are so close to begging. (Mother always said pride would undo you, pride was what you needed to watch out for, pride would ruin you without you even knowing, and you thought she meant demons, but now you think she meant this moment.)
She says she can’t, she won’t, and she doesn’t look at you, so you cup her face in your hands and stare at her, and you find it there in her eyes: that exhaustion that cut you to the bone, the sadness in her face that seems inescapable. You remember the battle scars that marked her body the last time you touched her, remember tracing them, committing them to memory, learning the topography of her body, her curves and scars like mountains and rivers. You needed to learn them by heart because you knew this moment would come, the moment when you would have to leave her. You remember how distant she was that last time, how light she felt in your arms. Like she was nothing.
She does not want to be saved, and you do not want her to throw her life away, but you can do nothing without her permission. All you can do is chastise her, sneer and call her selfish. She nods. She knows.
You ache. Your heart aches. Your body hurts all over with this pain, and you are furious that she would refuse you—not your body in this moment, but a future with you. You hate that she has made her decision and that her decision does not include you.
(But then, your decision had not included her, either. You always planned to leave. Now she knows this too.)
“I will not sit by and watch you throw your life away,” you spit, but your heart is pounding in your throat. You want to take it back, but it is too late, and it is true: you will leave before you watch her die. You cannot do it. You cannot.
You want to shake her, to scream, but she looks like she is made of glass standing there in front of the fire, and you are terrified that she will shatter if you touch her.
“Then go,” she says, and your heart breaks. She does not look at you. You do not need her to.
You brush past her, but you pause at the doorway. You mean to say I love you, to finally taste it on your tongue, but you say, “You are a fool, Logan Tabris. You will die when you could live, and you will die for nothing.”
She nods. You have more to say, but you cannot get it past the lump in your throat, the one that appeared when you said she would die, when you really, truly knew you were going to lose her.
You left the castle that night empty-handed besides a cloak and your staff slung across your back. You will go back to the Wilds, you think. When you return home, to the hut where Flemeth lived and died, then you will worry what to do about the life you feel growing in your body, the new being (half you, half her) inside of you.
*
You are watching Kieran in the royal gardens when you notice them for the first time: a faint smattering of freckles across his nose, a half dozen scattered across the top of his ears. Your heart lurches in your chest at the sudden thought of her, and then you laugh, and you keep laughing until a tear slips its way down your face. It is ungraceful, undignified. But you are grateful. You are so grateful. So grateful and so lost here, without her.
One day, Alistair will try to comfort you by saying you still have Kieran, still have a shred of her in the boy. You will tell him you could have had them both.
You will not say the thought of her, of raising your son with her, of lying next to her at night, the thought of holding or touching her again for even a moment, keeps you awake at night. He does not need to know that you dream about her still. You will not say it out loud, that you miss her terribly, that she was good for you.
You will never tell anyone you only spent one night in the Wilds after the Blight. By the time you made it to Flemeth’s hut, the Blight was over. (That meant she was dead.) It was all anyone could talk about in the last town you passed through. (They spoke glowingly of the Hero of Ferelden, a woman you knew and also didn’t know. No one mentioned Logan Tabris by name. No one spoke the name of the woman who was gone, who was dead, who you could never touch again.)
You spent only one night in Flemeth’s hut because the sound of the wind through the cattails kept you up all night, because you could only think of a lean-muscled elf, held together by scar tissue, bending in the wind, bending around blades and archdemons and forces of nature. You will never tell anyone that she ruined the swamp for you, that she ruined freckles and pan-seared rabbit and your heart.
You will keep her close to your chest for the rest of your life, tucked between your rib cage and your lungs. You can feel her there when you breathe and when your heart beats hard and when you hurt.
You will carry her always.