Work Text:
It doesn’t truly sink in – that Corypheus is dead, that the Breach is sealed, that the day is saved – until they return to Skyhold, and it’s him calling for a War Council meeting that his councillors are all reluctant to attend.
“You should be basking in your victory, Inquisitor,” Leliana chides him softly as he closes the door behind them. “At least for one day. Afterwards, you will be busy. Every noble in Southern Thedas is clamouring to meet you.”
He can’t help but laugh. “Oh, now they’re lining up to meet me?”
“Such is the way of things. Previously, you were an upstart – a mage of all things – leading rebels and heretics. Until Corypheus revealed himself, they could not see the single hand behind the chaos. Once he did, they knew. A magister and a darkspawn in one creature. The ultimate evil. Now, you are the only power left standing. Well… you, and…” She trails off, exchanging a glance with his other two advisors.
“Me and?” he prompts, his throat thick with apprehension.
“The new Divine.”
He steels himself. “They’ve made their decision?”
“We received the news shortly before you arrived,” Josephine explains softly, holding up a small slip of paper with an ostentatiously large seal attached to it. “The official announcement has not yet been made, though I suspect it shall follow soon. Your victory… promises that.”
Though he knows, no matter what that message might say, he will not lose her, his stomach is in knots.
“And?”
They glance between themselves, and he starts rehearsing the rebuttal in his head. The clever arguments he will make against the decision, the diplomatic way he’ll tell the Chantry to bugger off…
“They have named Cassandra.”
His hand shakes as he holds it out, and Josephine silently passes him the note. He needs to see it, needs to see her name on the slip of parchment.
‘In absentia, the conclave of clerics names as Divine: Lady Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast, Right Hand of Divine Justinia V. Regnal name to be announced.’
Lady Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast.
Cassandra.
Cassandra.
Cassandra.
He reads it over and over and over again, until the words swim before his eyes and no longer look like language at all. A hand settles on his shoulder, but he takes no comfort from it.
“Does she know?” he asks. The voice doesn’t sound like his own; dry and rasping.
The question is redundant, of course. They arrived back in Skyhold scarcely a half-hour ago, and she had been with him until he took the council into the war room. She hasn’t had a chance for anyone to tell her.
“No.” Leliana’s voice is too close. Her hand on his shoulder then. “As Josie said, the note only arrived after you had been sighted on the bridge.”
He needs to tell her.
Needs to…
She needs to…
They need to…
He turns without warning, colliding with Leliana, who steps between him and the door and then clearly thinks better of it, pulling back. Cullen says something, but he doesn’t hear the words, his head brimming with voices. Not the Well. That, at least, has fallen silent in his distress.
Outside the war room, past Josephine’s office, the hall is full of people. People pressing and talking and grabbing at him, but he barely notices them, walking too quickly through the swell of them, toward his quarters.
He had plans, void take him. Important plans. And now he can’t even breathe. Not until he hears her say…
“That was quick,” she says, smiling up at him from her reclined spot on the sofa in front of the fire. Then her face falls as she sees him. “What happened?”
Mutely, he holds out the note.
He can’t say the words.
Can’t…
She pushes herself up from the sofa, discarding her book unseeingly on the table as her eyes latch onto the seal dangling from the slip of parchment. It seems to take hours for her to cross the room to the top of the stairs where he stands, and yet no time at all before the note is taken from his fingertips.
He waits as she reads it, over and over and over again.
Her usually warm complexion pales.
Still, he waits.
She said she would turn it down. She said she would. He used his influence against her, wrote a letter to the conclave almost begging them to pick Leliana, and it failed. But she said that she would turn it down. She promised.
Yesterday, she promised.
Her gaze lifts from the note.
He waits for her to say the words.
Say that she’s going to turn it down.
Say that she loves him.
Say that she wants him more.
So his plans can be plans again.
She opens her mouth, and his heart lurches in his chest.
“I am sorry, Brennan.”
He can only stand, still, silent, as she brushes past him and leaves the room.
Leaves him.
It only takes another heartbeat for him to crumple to the floor, throwing out a hand to the bannister along the stairway so he doesn’t tumble down it. Not that he would be fully opposed to that, right now.
He sits there until the room darkens, the sun sinking below the mountains, and then he hears footsteps on the landing below. Not hers. He would know the sound of her boots anywhere.
“Inquisitor?”
Cullen. They’ve sent Cullen to talk to him. Not the person he was expecting, to be honest. Not that he realised he had been expecting anyone until he heard the voice. But he finds now that he had been waiting for Leliana. Her soft, Orlesian vowels shaping apologies and consolations. Telling him that she understood, even though she doesn’t, she can’t.
But no. Leliana will be with Cassandra, won’t she?
“Inquisitor? Are you there?”
Cullen sounds tentative, afraid. It must have been hours since he came upstairs, hours since she left. What is he expecting to find?
The door at the bottom of the stairs swings open, and then the footsteps are louder on the stairs as he ascends.
A relieved exhale of breath.
“Trevelyan?” he asks.
He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He’s not sure his throat knows how, anymore. Cullen sits down beside him, armour creaking. The sound reminds him of Cassandra; the way her plate scrapes against itself when she moves in it.
She won’t need plate armour when she’s wearing Chantry vestments.
The plate he designed for her will likely grace an armour stand in the Grand Cathedral, or some museum, gathering dust. A remnant of the new Divine’s former life.
“We’re here for you, should you need us,” Cullen says softly.
What can they do?
What can any of them do?
The only person who could do anything at all has already left him.
“She’s in the chapel,” Cullen says, as if he is reading his mind. “Leliana is with her.”
Just as he had assumed.
“Would you like anyone else with you? Varric? Dorian? Sera?”
He manages to shake his head, his throat still rebelling. This only serves to make Cullen look yet more concerned for him.
“Would you like me to leave?”
Again, he shakes his head. Though he wants to be alone, he knows he shouldn’t be. Just like he knows that he should get up. Just like he knows that he should pull himself together.
Cullen nods. “You can talk to me. I don’t… I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re going through, but if you would like to talk, I will listen.”
He swallows heavily, but it doesn’t shift the thick, heavy feeling that has settled there ever since he left the war room. This might be the longest he’s gone without talking in years. While conscious, at any rate. It was one of the things that he most often got in trouble for, back in the Circle. It used to get him in trouble with her too, in those early days when she would snap at him for getting them lost because he was distracted telling stories or asking endless questions of those they encountered.
Cullen waits patiently though, his hands resting on his knees.
“Is she well?” he manages eventually.
The slightest shadow crosses Cullen’s face before he replies with a half-shrug. “She was praying when I last saw her.” And then, after a beat, as if he doesn’t really want to say it but feels he should anyway. “And crying, too.”
His already fractured heart cracks just a little further. She must hate that. Not just the tears, though he’s sure she wouldn’t like that either, but the fact that people had seen her doing so. Even if it had only been Cullen and Leliana.
“Should I…” his voice breaks before he can finish.
Cullen’s face creases with concern. “I couldn’t say.”
He pushes himself to his feet, quickly, so he can’t second-guess himself and stay sat, still, forever. His legs, too used to being folded awkwardly where he fell, resist the movement, but he forces himself to stay steady.
Cullen rises only a beat after him, reaching out a hand.
“Trevelyan?”
“I need to see her. I need to talk to her. I need to listen to her.”
“And if she doesn’t know what to say?”
Much as he wishes that he could take that; to stop and wait and let her sort out the feelings in her heart, in her head, he’s done that once before. She had told him what she wanted then. If she has no answer now that the choices are laid clearly before her… Well, he knows what that means.
He just needs to hear her say it.
Before he knows it, he’s standing at the chapel door. The garden is eerily quiet, none of its usual inhabitants in residence. Josephine or somebody must have cleared them out to give Cassandra her privacy, such as it is.
Cullen lingers in the colonnade as he turns the handle with trembling fingers and steps inside.
Cassandra is knelt at the foot of the statue of Andraste, as still as the stone. Leliana is leaning against the wall. At the look on his face, she nods and slips out, letting the door shut behind her.
Just the two of them now. The two of them, and Andraste.
He should wait, like Leliana had.
He should.
But he doesn’t.
“Cassandra?”
She doesn’t startle at his voice, but, after a moment, her head turns.
Just as Cullen had said, her cheeks shine with tearstains in the candlelight. Her eyes are red with them. He wants to feel sorry for her, to comfort her, but instead it just… hurts. She remains kneeling in front of the statue, and, after a beat, he kneels beside her, an arm’s length away, his eyes on Andraste’s downturned face.
A single deep breath.
“Yesterday, I told you I wouldn’t lose you to the Chantry,” he starts quietly. “You… you promised I wouldn’t. But I… I won’t hold you to that.”
He meant to let her speak, but now that the words have begun to flow, he can’t seem to stop.
“If you want me to fight for you, I will, but… I can’t be the reason you turn your back on your faith. I can’t be the one standing in your way if you realise that you would want to take the throne. I couldn’t live with myself. And I think, if you’re honest with yourself, you already know what your decision is. All I ask is that… If you have doubts about being mine? If you think there is a chance that you will come to resent choosing me? Do it now.”
“You want me to leave?”
Her voice is thick with tears, and it reminds him, like an arrow to the gut, of that first night under the stars, where she cried in his arms. Her knight in shining robes, he’d promised. Some knight he’d turned out to be.
He feels like a beast for making her cry.
But he shakes his head, still looking up at Andraste’s face.
This is all her fault, he decides.
If she’d picked some other person to be her Herald; someone who wouldn’t have thoroughly and selfishly fallen in love with Cassandra at first sight; someone who wouldn’t have courted her, at first unintentionally and then fully intentionally when she showed the slightest hint that that might have been welcomed; someone who wouldn’t have turned her head and her heart from the path of righteousness… Perhaps then they wouldn’t all be in such a mess.
“I do not understand what you are asking of me.”
He lets his gaze drop, eyes finding hers.
Have courage, he tells himself.
“If you’re going to break my heart, break it now. Please. And I’ll smile and wish you well, and tell you you’ll make an excellent Divine.”
“I love you.”
Her voice catches on the second word, and it feels like one of Commander Helaine’s hailstorms.
He nods. “I love you. But I also know you, and I know that you want to change the Chantry. You want to fix it, like you fix everything else. You want to carry on Justinia’s work. You want to rebuild the Seekers. And if you were Divine, you could do all of those things.”
“I do not have to be Divine to do those things.”
“It would make it easier though, wouldn’t it?”
She looks away from him, her gaze falling to her hands, still clasped together in prayer.
“I don’t blame you, Cassandra,” he says, his voice so steady now. She hasn’t said it, but it’s clear now what her answer will be. “In another life, perhaps…”
No. He shuts down that train of thought sharply.
“I wish I had not been chosen,” she says, softly as a confession, staring at her hands. “I wish the decision had not been mine to make.”
He nods again. Then he forces himself to smile. It’s tight and sad and not at all the kind of smile he wants to make, but it’ll do for now.
“You really will make an excellent Divine, Cassandra.”
And then… there’s nothing more to say, is there?
He pushes himself to his feet, and this time she does startle, looking up at him with fresh tears and sorrow in her eyes.
“What will you do?”
The memory of their conversation on this particular subject suddenly comes into sharp relief in his mind. Three options, he’d put to her. Setting up the Inquisition as the Divine’s personal taskforce, throwing himself from the balcony, or marrying one of the insipid nobles who kept sending him proposals. None of them sound appealing anymore. Not now that this is real.
“The Inquisition still has work,” he tells her. “The Inquisitor still has work. Fade rifts to close and… so on. We have that expedition in the Basin, and I’m sure any number of other issues will arise now that we have been victorious. I will keep myself busy.”
“I could…”
Could what? Could stay? Could go with him? She doesn’t finish her sentence.
“You’ll be needed at the Grand Cathedral,” he reminds her. “Work to do. Preparations to be made. You’ll be busy too.”
She nods, or at least, she makes a small, half-aborted movement with her chin, and he takes it as a nod.
“And will you…” she trails off again, voice giving out.
She wants to ask him if he will move on from her. He knows she does. Does she want him to say he won’t? To tell her that he’ll remain faithful and chaste and alone, just as she will? Or does she want him to fall in love with someone else? Neither prospect sounds inviting, so he dodges the question.
“I will be the Inquisitor. You will be the Divine. Heavy titles, but we will carry them.”
“Brennan…”
He shakes his head this time. It’s the first time she’s used his name since she ran from their room, and it stabs at his heart. Not like an arrow, not like hailstones, but like one of Cole’s daggers. Sharp and precise and fatal.
“We will make the announcement at the party. When all the troops are back and everyone is around to celebrate with you. With us.”
“I’m sorry.”
Lifting his hand, he waves her apology away.
“I’ll leave you to your prayers, Most Holy.”
Her face twists, brow creasing. “You… you don’t have to call me that.”
He nods. “I think… I think I do.”
Then, he turns. But before he can make it to the door, she moves, grasping at his sleeve. He is powerless against her even now, letting her pull him into her arms, her lips unerringly finding his. Her mouth tastes of salt even as she kisses him desperately, passionately, feverishly. A last kiss, if ever there was one. He tries to give himself over to it, not to dwell on the idea that he will never touch her this way again, but it’s over before he can even begin to memorise the sensation.
When she breaks away from him, he leaves the chapel.
Leaves the garden.
Leaves the keep.
Leaves Skyhold.
Leliana follows him. He knows she’s there, even if her footsteps are all but silent and she stays a respectful ten paces behind him at all times. He isn’t heading in any specific direction, but before he knows it, he ends up at a very familiar place.
A grove.
They had their first date here. Their first kiss. The first time he said ‘I love you’ to her, even if he hadn’t actually intended to say it so soon.
He reaches the tree – their tree – and slumps to the ground at the foot of it.
Her book had landed here, he thinks. Dropped from her hand while she kissed him.
Discarded.
He tries not to dwell on the parallels.
“I was going to ask her to marry me.”
Leliana sits gracefully down on the grass beside him, silent and still.
“That’s why I called the meeting. This morning, when we got back from the Valley. I wanted your help planning my proposal.” He reaches into a pouch on his belt, retrieving a small roll of parchment, and passes it to her. The roll is about the same size as the one that bore the Chantry seal, and the coincidence makes him want to vomit. “I drew this last night. I was going to ask your opinions; if you thought Harritt was capable of making it, or if I’d have to find a more skilled jeweller to do the work.”
She remains silent.
“I wish they’d named you. Or Vivienne. Void, I wish they’d named Mother Giselle, or Hevara or… literally anyone else. Dorian seems like a decent candidate to me right now.”
A quiet, girlish chuckle escapes Leliana’s lips, and he can’t help but smile.
“I know, I know. He’d look terrible in the hat.” He takes a breath. “I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m angry, and I can’t be. I can’t be angry at her for doing what her heart tells her is right, and I can’t be angry at myself for letting her, and I can’t be angry at the Maker or Andraste for putting this in our path. All I can be angry at are the clerics, and that’s a useless waste of time.”
She sighs sympathetically.
“I love her. I love her so much. And it isn’t enough. It wasn’t enough. Why wasn’t it enough?”
She lays her hand between them, palm up. Again, it reminds him of Cassandra, and the pain in his gut boils over. One, tiny, well-meaning gesture, and all the emotion that has been bubbling in him since the moment that Leliana had mentioned the new Divine, suddenly overflows.
He cries.
He cries for all the plans he had had. The plans that had only been the vaguest of notions, of images, until far too recently.
Cassandra with a wreath of flowers in her hair, letting him promise to love her for the rest of his days. A cottage, on the shore. A fireplace full of wood they had chopped with their own hands.
A child?
He cries.
Leliana sits with him. Silent and still. A solid presence by his side, uncritical.
Eventually, the tears run dry. He catches his breath, and then gets to his feet. He doesn’t bother to announce that they are going back to Skyhold. She’ll be able to figure that out.
The hall is quiet when they reach it, not full like it had been. The few people who mill about don’t bother either of them as they walk between the long tables, up to the dais, and through the door to his quarters.
He practises in his head what to say to Cassandra, if he finds her in their room. The apology he will make for his behaviour in the chapel. The reassurance he will give.
It turns out to be for naught.
The room is empty.
… more than empty.
Her armour stand is gone.
Her trunk too.
There are tell-tale gaps in his bookshelves where her novels used to sit.
Her desk is still there, but the papers are gone from its surface. He strides over, pulling the drawers open. The quills and inks remain, but her notes and books are gone.
He guesses that if he checks the armoire, her clothes will be gone too.
Already, there is a hole in his life where she used to be. A hole he doesn’t think he’s ever going to be able to fill quite the same way again.
He turns to Leliana.
“I think I want to be alone now,” he tells her. “Tomorrow… tomorrow everything can start again. I’ll be in the war room at the usual time. Can you make sure there’s some good, meaty problems for me to solve?”
She gives him a sad, sad smile, and nods, before she slips out of the room.
He runs his fingers along the edge of her desk. She’d been so happy, that day. They’d been happy. He can think of a hundred days like it. A hundred days where she had smiled at something he had done, and his heart had swelled with pride at the acknowledgment, the affection.
There will be no more of that.
Just work. Work, and work, and more work, until Thedas doesn’t need him anymore. And then he’ll have to find some other way to keep himself occupied.
Until the memories stop hurting quite so much…
He crosses to the bed, suddenly feeling so tired that he thinks he will fall asleep where he stands if he’s not careful.
So many memories here too. Obviously.
The pillow still smells like her hair. Jasmine, and something else he never did identify, and never will now. Faint. It’s only going to get fainter, he tells himself. He might as well take advantage of it now. So he curls himself around the pillow.
And closes his eyes.
*
He wakes.
Cassandra is soft and sleep-warm in his arms, her face buried in the crook of his neck. He inhales deeply against her hair, jasmine, and something he hasn’t yet identified. Her left hand is on his chest, her engagement ring on her finger where he put it. (Twice). There’s a slight warmth to the metal where it touches him. She must be feeling cold.
He pulls the blanket up and over them. The movement makes her stir, nose rubbing against his shoulder as she tries to block out the thin moonlight that seeps through the gaps in the curtains.
“Brennan?” she says, voice thick with sleep.
“Sleep, my love,” he tells her.
He feels her answering smile against his skin. But then, a frown.
“Why are you awake?” she asks, tipping her head back to look at him through half-lidded eyes.
“Bad dream,” he answers, not seeing the use of lying to her.
She presses a kiss against his shoulder, another against his throat, another against his jaw, until she makes her way to his lips, rolling half on top of him the way she knows he likes.
“Want to talk about it?” she asks when she pulls away, curling up against his side once more.
He does think about telling her. About letting her comfort and reassure him the way he knows she would, if she heard the content of his dream. But he doesn’t want to upset her. Leliana is named Divine. She will be crowned soon, and then she will name her own successor. Not Cassandra.
They never have to worry about that.
“No,” he tells her.
She nods against his chest.
“I love you,” he says.
“Love you.” Her echo is half-asleep again, soft and warm like her.
He holds his fiancée in his arms, gathering her close, and when he slips back into sleep, his dreams are filled with a day when she will stand before him, a wreath of flowers in her hair.
Letting him promise to love her.
For the rest of his days.