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El loves her new studio. It's tiny, reflecting her wallet, but it's absolutely drenched in light for most of the day, and better yet, she doesn't have to share.
Her first painting goes well enough, as she expected. It's the second that surprises her.
What if the light were behind him?
The thought seizes her as if by magic. She scrapes off the lackluster effort she'd already made and starts again, blocking quickly, trying to keep hold of that mental image – the light behind him, gleaming on his skin, blindingly bright and casting everything else into shadow. The way the texture of his clothes rises and falls with his musculature, and how that scatters the light, softening it, and how it throws color onto her model's face. The shadows, then, and the way they follow his skin like a lover, the way that they cling and caress his face, his mouth, his eyes; the endless shades and variations of color in the skin, cooler here, warming there.
She only eats when her hands start to shake. She sleeps when she can't see straight. She doesn't stop for four days. On the last day she's down to the smallest details, the fine crinkle lines on his lips, the difficult and very subtle sheen on his eyelashes, the dark shadow within his slightly open mouth, temptation and fascination, all in one.
It's done. One of her teachers had told them knowing when it's done is the hardest part. She doesn't have that feeling today, the one that tells her to keep working, that she can just adjust a few things, that this part over here is amateurish and she can fix it. It's just – It's done.
It's the best thing she's ever done. She snaps a picture for her portfolio, hangs it up to dry, goes home, and sleeps like the dead for two days.
She goes back to work then, but she doesn't know what she wants to work on. She has some sketches, a few photographs, so she pulls them all out to see if anything strikes her fancy.
But her eyes keep going back to the finished portrait. It hasn't lost any of its fascination to her, even though it's started to dry and the colors are slightly dull.
Your brushwork is extraordinary. Why aren't you using that?
Like she's in a trance, she starts sorting through her materials until she finds the photograph she's looking for, a placid, beautiful oak forest. She has an idea.
Her normal subject is portraiture; it takes her longer than it should to really nail the tree textures and the way that the light falls through the leaf cover and dapples the ground with shifting, almost watery patterns, but she keeps at it. She gets there eventually. There's a little path through the trees, winding slowly around them and shrinking into the distance, into the shadows in the background, inviting, a little bit lonely.
It's the foreground tree she works the most on. She paints him into it in brushstrokes, too subtle to be noticed until one looks at the painting for long enough; she does him justice, though, paints his long face, his heavy, sensuous lips, the direct, challenging eyes. She lays him out in brushstrokes, and only in brushstrokes.
This, too, is her favorite thing she's ever done.
She hangs it to dry next to the first and sighs. She both loves and hates finishing a piece; she loves achieving what she set out to do, but she enjoys the physical process of painting, the colors, the planning, and she misses it when the paintings are complete. Some of her fellow art students called her obsessive. She just – she enjoys what she does, what's wrong with that?
There's nothing wrong with that.
Damn right there isn't. She works hard and she loves it. She's lucky that she has the skill, and she works so hard, every day, to be better than the day before.
She stretches another canvas and stares at nothing, tapping her pencil on her mouth as she thinks. She wants colors in the shadows this time, she decides, the oily sheen of walnut, a subdued leafy green, sepia and dull ivory, and that shifting, moody color just between blue and grey that reflects everything around it.
She blocks out shapes and forms that suggest and hint and speculate but nothing that stands up and says I am – nothing ever definite, nothing real, only the warm colors in the shadows, the way they fit together to tell a story, impressions of melting color. She finishes the blocking and leaves it to sit overnight, because truth be told, she cannot take another night on her tiny couch, and something about this studio will not let her rest until she finishes whatever she wants to work on.
It's a blessing, honestly it is – she's never been so focused in her life – but her sleep is suffering.
In the morning she erases half the blocking and starts over, because the dawn light is exquisite and all her colors glow more than she expected; she's still thinking about them as she does the underpaint, staring at an empty wall by the best east-facing window while she taps the brush against her mouth. (It's usually the dry end.)
And she keeps looking over at that wall as she paints, even though it's not really in her line of sight and her neck starts to get sore after a while.
After a while, she goes over and tapes up one of her inspiration pictures, something inoffensive and a bit boring, just so she'll have something to look at. Ten minutes later, she goes back again and rips it down. And for the next three days she paints like that, glancing at the empty, light-drenched wall every time she needs to think about what she should do next.
Her painting turns out better than she'd hoped, though, gorgeous shades of browns and ambers and ivory that warm her all the way through like a secret hug, slashed through with that pale, verdant green and pinpricks of grey. All of this practice has been amazing for the quality of her work, and she's painting faster than ever before, but –
She needs a break.
You need a drink.
Oh, creators, a drink sounds amazing. And fresh air, sunlight, her friends –
She checks her phone, winces at the number of texts she's left unanswered – her mother is in there, she is so dead. Luckily, everyone else is already used to her, but she probably ought to go to them, as a peace offering.
She calls Sera.
"Motherfucker! El, you're alive!"
She laughs. "For my sins. Hey, are you and Dags going out tonight?"
She has to hold her phone away from her ear at Sera's piercing scream, but she's laughing all the same.
They're out at their usual place, drinking their usual cack, talking about the usual shite, but she hasn't been here in so long that everything feels new and fresh and unusually pleasing. She can't stop smiling. It's just so good to see everyone all together again.
At least, it is until Dorian asks what she's been working on.
"Just my normal," she says with a smile, tipping her beer up to chase the dregs. "Doing some work with shadows. You know."
"Who's your model?" Ah, yes. Dorian was always more interested in who she was painting than the actual work itself.
For a minute she can't remember. He's gone clean out of her head, and as she tries and tries to think, a slow, creeping panic steals over her. Why can't she remember –
It comes to her then, like a bolt from heaven. She laughs. The panic falls away like an oversized coat. "Oh, creators, I nearly forgot. I did that life-drawing class with Kleiner at the university, remember?"
Dorian laughs. "Ye gods, don't I? Isn't that when you brought us that man-mountain?"
She squints at Dorian. "Aren't you dating said man-mountain?"
As Dorian is currently vehemently denying having any kind of soft feelings ever, for anyone, in the history of time, this is enough to get him off the subject.
But why did she want that so badly in the first place?
When the group breaks up, she starts walking back to her flat, but on a whim she swings around to her studio on the way. She wants to do some sketches with an eye to filling the gaps in what she's done so far, to maybe turn them into a series, or a tighter grouping than they are right now, linked only by hazy stylistic tendencies.
She hangs up all of her recent paintings, everything she's done since she moved into this studio, and stands back to look at them as a group.
And what she sees is –
It's him. He's everywhere. He's the colors she wanted so badly, ivory in his shirt and the blue-grey, shifting color of his eyes; it's his face she painted as bark, as shadowed, close-up and far away, in the vaguest of impressions and with incredible detail. That one is his profile. This one – he's posed and poised against the wall of her studio, that inexplicable wall that she couldn't keep her fucking eyes off of all day, calmly looking out the window at the afternoon sunlight. It's always the same man.
And she's never met him in her life. She remembers now what she had inexplicably forgotten at dinner; she'd asked Kleiner for model recommendations and he'd never gotten back to her. This man is a complete stranger. Why hadn't she remembered that? Why had she come up with some kind of false memory to explain this away?
Is this place haunted? Is he a ghost? Or is she losing it? What the fuck –
You see it now, do you?
That was not her.
She backs away from – from the studio at large, only stopping when her back hits the wall. She hadn't heard that with her ears. It was like something spoke to her, directly to her, putting its voice inside her head. Or she's going insane, like so many artists do. That is far more likely than – She can't help looking at the paintings again, at his face in loving detail.
"What is happening to me?" she whispers, panic building in her chest.
Someone sighs; it's a man's voice, and this time quite real, not inside her head at all. Then the air shimmers across the studio against the far wall, building his form out of shadows and light until he looks just as real as everything else in the room. It's the man she's painted over and over again; she stares at him, terrified, but unable to stop herself from drinking in every detail of his face, for once not fragmented or colored by her own perceptions or the style in which she's painted him. He's not handsome, but he is – Something about his face is intensely compelling.
"I've frightened you. You have my apologies," he says, folding his hands behind his back. He's so calm, so still and placid that she finds herself echoing him and his body language. It does help, against all her expectations. "It's not often that people recognize what's happening."
She stares at him with huge eyes, trying to understand – He'd just appeared out of nowhere. He – Is he real? She swallows. "Who are you?"
"I've no desire to hurt you," he says, so gently that she almost believes him. "Please. Won't you sit?"
He reaches for her chair, and watching him move is almost more terrifying than his inexplicable presence; he moves like smoke, like lightning, he doesn't exist between one movement and the next, flickering between moments like an old movie reel.
"This can't be real," she says, both staring at him and withdrawing into herself at the same time. Her eyes sting, not from tears but from staring so hard that they're drying out. She can't blink. If she does, he might not be there when she opens her eyes, and the idea of that feels like dying inside, like truly going mad.
He pulls the swivel chair out from her drafting table for her, his manners so picture-perfect, so exquisitely genteel, but she's still frozen in place.
"Ellana. Sit before you fall down." The thread of restrained amusement in his voice is what snaps her out of it at last.
"And if I say no?" she snaps, crossing her arms over her chest. "I have no idea who you are, or – " She swallows again. "Or what you are, or what you fucking want – How the fuck d'you know my name?" As she talks she grows angrier and more defensive, as if her fear is seizing on the excuse to be something other than terror. "What the fuck is happening?"
He glances at her, and then the chair, but she stubbornly stays exactly where she is with the whole studio between them. He sighs. "You would be stubborn," he says, softly, smiling a little, as if he could possibly be fond of that part of her.
He's not wrong, but... How does he knowthat?
"Please," she says, hating how thin her voice sounds in her ears. "Tell me what's going on."
He folds his hands behind his back again. "I am inspiration, in its purest form."
"Inspiration," she says, blank. Echoing.
He inclines his head. He has such a sense of self-possession about him, and she catches herself thinking she'd quite like to paint him that way, and then hating herself for the thought – That's how all of this started. Shut it, she tells her brain furiously.
She may as well have pissed on a live wire. A part of her she can't control is already planning light and composition for the portrait.
He smiles, a tiny, affectionate, restrained thing, like –
It's almost like he knows what's going through her head.
If she tried to press herself against the wall any harder, she'd merge into it. "Are you reading my mind?"
Through the door, down two and a half flights of stairs, and out the front door; that's her first chance of finding another person, in the punters and gobshites crowding the streets below that she can hear even three stories up. She has no idea if that would be enough, but it's got to be worth a try.
He takes several steps away from her. "No," he says quietly. "No, I can't do that."
And she has the oddest feeling that she's hurt him.
She licks her lips, debating whether she should apologize. "But there is something. Isn't there."
For the first time, he can't quite look her in the face.
Yeah. There's always something.
"Your thoughts are your own," he says, so emphatically that she has to believe him.
"Say I believe that," she says, watching him intently. "What isn't?"
He lifts his eyes to hers, clear, delicate stone-grey; start with ultramarine blue, dots of alizarin crimson and cadmium yellow, then a flood of titanium white to tone it up –
Stop it!
Sometimes she hates her brain.
"Ellana," he says, persuasive, but appealing, as if he's begging her to believe him. "Can't you feel the energy you create when you're truly inspired in your work? You are making something that has never existed before, and will never exist again. I am... attuned to that energy. It sustains me."
She stares at him. "Like some kind of vampire?"
"I would never take from you – " He looks insulted, as if he has any right to be, and that snaps the last of her patience.
She gestures around the room, wildly, nearly knocking over her spare easel. "I've barely been able to stop long enough to breathe since I moved in! You've had me at my painting day in, day out – I feel like I have to leave just to get a night's sleep – "
He interrupts her there. "That is not me." He sighs, makes a face. "Not precisely. Your work is extraordinary, Ellana." He smiles, faintly, just a little thing, but his eyes lighten, and brighten, and suddenly El is mixing new shades in her head, racing the clock, trying her best to capture the color so she can paint it again later. "I admit, I have been pushing you. My apologies, for that, at least; but I was not forcing you to work. Being truly inspired can be both a blessing and a curse."
"That really was you," she says slowly. "In my head. Giving me ideas."
This is unbelievable. This is – Has she actually gone mad?
"Suggestions," he corrects her, smiling that faint smile. "The ideas are only ever yours."
She looks at him, her heart in her throat, waiting for more, for something more awful than this, but he's folded his hands behind his back and lets her look, strength without challenge, confident in himself and secure in his skin.
What there is of it, she thinks, and her giggle then is unfortunately slightly hysterical.
She bites her lip. His eyes drop to her mouth, and then back up to her eyes, but she saw it nonetheless. She has to swallow before she speaks. "What do you want from me?"
"Nothing that could ever harm you," he says instantly, continuing on in a slower, more thoughtful manner afterwards, as if he's thinking hard even as he speaks. "Only that we should go on in the same way that we have since you arrived, though you were unaware of my presence."
He hasn't tried to hurt her. That's something. Neither has he threatened her.
"Are you stuck here? Or..." She has no idea how to say it. "Bound? Do you have to be here?"
The smile melts from his face, till he's left with wariness. "I am not bound to any place."
El hesitates, wondering if she's actually going to do this, still half-convinced she's unhinged and imagining everything, all of it, and him besides... and then she says, "Then I want you to leave for a week. A full week, and then you come back, and I'll tell you what I've decided."
He stares at her, as if he's asking Are you really sure?
She has never been more sure of anything. She needs time to think, and room to breathe. She nods, a small gesture that she regrets as soon as she's done it, but he nods back to her and wraps himself back up and disappears before her eyes.
"Fucking hell," she says, to thin air.
El realizes, only after he's gone, that she doesn't know the extent of his powers. He might be able to reach her from afar, or anything, she has no idea... but she thinks she knows the tone of his mind now, the difference between her first painting and the rest, or the ones she'd done at school or in the pokey little garret she'd shared with three other starving artists. At a certain point, she has to stop wondering about mights and maybes, to ignore what if and make a decision. This is hers.
She sets herself a schedule that week; she treats it like a job, going to her studio in the morning, sketching in the full flood of morning light from the eastern windows, then moving on in the afternoon to blocking, and two she takes to a full portrait. She makes herself stop for lunch. She calls her mother, she texts her friends, she goes out with them again and lets her hair down. She feels more like herself than she has in months.
Her portraits are – one of them is frankly uninspired, the sort of thing she used to paint for professors who wanted her to change who she was and what her process was just to pass their class. The other is better, quite a bit better, and she would have been proud of it. Before.
And then she goes home that night, and thinks about who she is, about what she really values about herself, about what she wants out of this life that's been given her to live as she sees fit, and by the end of the week she knows what she's going to do.
———
She's not waiting for him. That sets entirely the wrong tone for the conversation she wants to have. She's sketching again, wondering if she can get out a decent portrait of Sera and Dagna for their anniversary, when she glances up at a smudge on the far wall that unfolds and unfolds and unfolds into him.
She doesn't even know his name. Or if he has one.
She shoves down another qualm that threatens to surface. I'm done with you, she tells that part of herself, and makes herself smile at him.
"I'm glad you're here," she says.
He folds his hands behind him, staying quite still otherwise. The way he moves – today it bothers her less, without the new shock of his sudden existence, without them being alone together in her safe place at night.
"I'm happy to hear that," he says with a slight smile. He looks around at her studio, which isn't changed in the slightest, except, of course, in the new works drying on the wall. "May I?" He nods at the portraits, as if he could possibly be talking of anything else.
"I'd like your opinion," she says, and while she knew that was true, she hadn't expected how much she wants him to like them, even if they aren't her best work. She wants him to like them anyway. She wants him to see something in them, in her, that she doesn't see. Considering who – and what – he is, his good opinion would be something to treasure.
El waits in an agony of impatience as he nearly touches his nose to one, examining it so closely that she can't tell if he's moving at all. "Technically skilled, of course." He says it in an aside without looking at her at all, never taking his eyes from the painting, retreating slowly to take it in at a foot away, at three feet away, and then as far from it as he can get in the room. He slides a cool, considering glance at her. "But I think you know what I'm going to say."
"Nothing I haven't told myself already," she agrees, irritated, though whether at herself or him she couldn't say. She knows how to take criticism of her work whether fair or not; years of art school made sure of that. Somehow, this means more to her.
He smiles when he moves onto the other painting, the two children she'd spotted dodging through the midday crowd on the street outside her studio building, one human, one elf. She'd squatted down and taken the hastiest picture of her life, and even though half of it was out of focus and her finger was over one corner of the camera and the framing is crooked, she'd caught what she needed. The children race each other, laughing, the brightest pops of color in a sea of people wearing jeans and light colors to escape an unending hot summer. She likes the effect of the adults as blurs, unimportant and one step removed from the narrative.
It is perhaps insipid, but she doesn't care, not when she likes it; not when the first person she's shown looks at it the way he is – with a gentle, amused, reminiscent smile.
She wonders if he was ever young, to make him look at children at play like that. That is not a learned response. It's a memory he's recalling with pleasure. She wants to ask him what he's thinking about, whether he was born or somehow made; she wants to know more about him.
"What's your name?" she asks, breaking the silence that lays thick on her studio like cotton wool.
He turns to look at her, his smile growing, still quiet in its pleasure but aimed now like an arrow. "I am Solas," he says simply. And it's –
He falls into place in her life between one heartbeat and the next, one that hadn't existed before that moment, a place he creates for himself. It's like her heart recognizes him right down to her fundament. You, it says.
She swallows, confused by the strength of her own response. "I'm Ellana." She finds it in her to laugh, at herself, if nothing else. "I think you knew that already. Most of my friends call me El, though, it's easier."
"Hmmm," he says, turning aside, dismissing her kindly. She laughs a little, just a breath of air. All right. No nicknames, I guess...
She can do business, too. "You can stay," she says, abrupt, awkward; she can't help but feel graceless compared to his measured, stately way of speaking. He comes back around to smile at her again, wider and with more warmth than the one before, and she takes heart in his quiet pleasure. "You kept your word," she says haltingly. "You stayed away. And you came back. You do – " She swallows, more invested in this question than she wants to admit. "You do want to stay? With me?"
"I do," he confirms, his smile growing again, and she can't help but think it's at her awkwardness. At her. Or maybe she's just hoping –
"Good."
They smile at each other for a long, hanging moment, her marveling at the quiet, unassuming strength of him, stubbornness in the firm set of his eyes and humor drawn in the smile lines around his mouth, and all the while he presses his mouth tighter together, as if that could hide the fondness that is so clear to her it makes her fingers itch.
"Oh!" she exclaims, diving for her sketches – she'd been completely incapable of working on anything else until she got the thought she'd had down, the one of him against that damn wall. She glares at him; she hasn't forgiven him for that day, even if the painting is stellar. "That was a nasty trick," she says, even though there's no way he could possibly have any idea what she's talking about unless he's been lying and he can read her mind after all.
He – Solas – he arches a polite eyebrow, though she has the feeling that he's silently laughing at her. She thinks he laughs easily, and often. She points her chin at that wall. "When you did whatever it is you did to make me see things that weren't there, when in reality you were there all along," she explains, though it's begrudging.
"Blame yourself, if you will," Solas says, linking his hands behind his back. "Not many people can see one of my kind if we don't wish it."
"But I couldn't see you," she says, confused. "I just – " Confused, she stops, trying to remember, trying to put the odd feeling she'd had into words. "It was as if something was calling for my attention."
He grows very still.
"Wait," she says slowly. "Wait, if that wasn't me – "
Solas turns his face away very slightly, as if he can prevent her from looking at him that way.
Not for the first time, she wonders about him, about what a muse is, how it's born and survives and whether he can ever truly die. If he's alone. If he can be lonely. How long has it been since he spoke with anyone? Could he find another muse if he wanted to?
"Are you the only – " She hesitates. She finds she's having a hard time saying the word muse out loud, as if saying it aloud makes it more real. "The only one of your kind?"
He's silent for so long that she slowly starts sorting through her sketches again. "There are others," he admits. She looks up again to find him watching her, his mouth a straight, uncompromising line. "I am yours."
He doesn't sound happy about it. Perhaps he doesn't like the idea – or perhaps he simply hadn't wanted to admit it. She feels like she should have a million questions about this, and if she lets herself think about it she's sure that she would, but she also thinks that he won't answer any of them and that he might resent her if she asks them at all.
So. There's one question she does require an answer to, and if that makes things awkward for everyone involved, that's just too bad.
El leans forward onto her elbows, taking a slow, careful breath. "Would you change that, if you could?"
Solas still won't look at her. She wishes he would.
"No," he says.
That's good enough. She lets it lie.
She blatantly changes the subject, sliding sketches across the table for him to look at; she thinks that he appreciates the table separating them. She does, too. That was... a lot. She wants to digest what she's learned.
They talk about art, instead, starting with the differences in perspective and posing and framing in her sketches, and then more theoretically, schools of art, color stories, brush technique. She has never talked to anyone who knows as much as he does, ever, not even her professors; not only does he know how the thing was accomplished, he knows why.
They talk for hours, and she gets almost nothing done but her brain feels like it's swollen three times too big with everything she's learned. She wants to start on something right now. She reaches for a canvas.
"Go home," he says firmly. She glances up at him, startled. "This will still be here in the morning."
El bites her lip. She doesn't want him to be right. Or smug. And she thinks he's both.
"Will you be here in the morning?" she can't stop herself from asking him.
She's surprised him, she can tell that much; his face softens, that gentle smile warming her again. "I will."
She falls asleep dreaming of the painting she wants to start the next day, and as soon as she gets back to her studio she starts blocking it out, ignoring everything else, even her morning tea steaming on her sketching table, even him, leaning against the wall and watching her work. She dreamed him falling into darkness head-first, a side profile, his eyes closed, his face gentle in repose; the background has to demand a closer look, a story told in chips of color like a mosaic. It's not his story, because she doesn't know it, and even if she did, it's not hers to tell.
When she shows him what she's thinking, Solas's slow, thoughtful smile is its own reward. He agrees to sit for her, too, although she's fairly sure she could paint him with her eyes closed at this point. She's never been the kind of person who needs absolute silence to work, and though she often gets distracted by her work, she and Solas start to have long, winding conversations that never end up quite where she thought they would.
The painting, on the other hand, turns out exactly as she'd planned, and it's perfect. Those two things are not always true, but when they are it's something to celebrate.
El takes the next day off and does nothing but lie around her apartment; her roommates have gotten used to her not being around and are visibly irritated to see her, but she doesn't care. London in the summer is absolute murder and she's not going anywhere.
Solas is happy to talk about other things than art. It should come as no surprise that he likes history. She's always been rather stupid about it, but somehow he explains it in people, and in relationships, in ways that she understands.
She thinks that she was right, that he was lonelier than he wants to admit. How long has it been since he could talk to anyone? She's also discovering things about herself; having someone who lives and breathes art the way that she does, who drives her to be better, who cares what she wants means more to her than she would have guessed. She knows that her habits push people away. Normally, she's fine with that. Somehow she's gathered a group of friends who don't seem to take offense at the way she ignores their texts most of the time. But Solas doesn't just accept the way that she is, he understands what's driving her. It's a small but crucial difference.
That's part of what makes her ask. El's not even working on anything in particular, mostly sketching for the sake of it, seeing what some of her ideas might look like if she combines them; she happens to glance up at him and catch him watching her with – what is that? It's like he's sad, but...
Whatever it is, he wipes it from his face the instant he notices her watching him.
El bites her lip, considering him. Regret, she decides. It had been regret on his face as he watched her sketch, and on an impulse she pushes over her cart of sketchbooks and pads of paper and pencils and markers and all the other art supplies she's collected over the years.
"Do you want to have a go?"
Solas raises his eyebrows at her. "This truly isn't necessary." But he's already picking up one of the thicker-weight sketchbooks and her coptic markers.
El laughs. "There aren't many things that are really necessary, but I think you and I can agree that art is worth it for its own sake." she says, pleased with herself.
They're quieter than usual that day, but he shows her what he's been working on when she asks, and she takes one look at it and gapes at him. "You have done this before," she accuses him. Solas folds his sly, pleased smile away, but not before she sees it.
There's so much color and light on the page she can hardly bear it. There's two figures, one white and one black, facing away from each other, forever parted by the black line slashed down the page. There are mountains behind them, and a river before them, and the whole thing is enclosed by an intricate ouroborus.
There's a story in this that she doesn't understand. Sometimes she forgets that he's seen so much, that he can speak languages that are long since dead, and this, the visual language of art, is one of them.
"It's fantastic," she says softly.
Solas smiles at her, full and unrestrained for the first time since they've met, and with that he sinks into her heart and makes a home there and that's when she understands that nothing will ever be the same for her.
El makes some excuse and fairly flees her studio, conscious of Solas looking after her in worry but unable to stay, afraid that if she does she'll say something, or he'll realize just by looking at her face, and she doesn't want that. She wants to think. She takes a shower, she eats something and brushes her teeth, and then she lies in her bed and lets her mind wander where it will.
She's at least half in love with him. That much, she's sure of. She thinks she's hovering on the precipice of falling the rest of the way, because there's a growing expansiveness of her feelings about him, a disgustingly rosy-colored haze to the edges of her thoughts of him, that can mean nothing else.
So how does she feel about that?
She reaches for her phone, flicking back through her camera roll until she reaches her first painting of him, the darkness of the background and then his features glowing with light and color – She zooms in on his mouth, and for the first time she realizes how lovingly and intently she'd rendered it, working for hours to capture the exact, sensual curve of his lower lip, the way they're slightly parted, as if he's about to speak, or to kiss her –
El drops her phone as if it's burnt her. Had this really been laying under the surface all this time and she never noticed? She picks her phone back up and scrolls further, looking at all of her paintings of him, the way she's framed his mouth, his hands, his hot, intense eyes and the muscular lines of his thigh –
Oh. She really has been looking at him quite a lot, hasn't she. And now that she knows that, she can feel what the thought of him does to her body, the way she yearns for him, in any way she can get him. It would be quite difficult to unring this bell.
Does she want to?
She likes him quite a lot. He's become the first person she wants to talk to in the morning and she never wants to leave her studio at night, even if she doesn't have her hands in her paint that day. She thinks that she might never get tired of watching his mind at work, his intense, expressive eyes, the way satisfaction and curiosity draw his face harsher with concentration, with an interest he would never bother to fake.
The only difference between them is that he's not a creature of the flesh, like she is. She wonders if that matters. It doesn't seem to, at least not to her; but there is another person in this equation, and his wants and feelings are of equal importance to hers.
El registers, with some disbelief, that she's already made her decision. She wants him. She's conscious of what she'd be giving up, the idea of a normal life, a partner she can share with others, but those things are not as important to her as what he gives her, the way that she feels most alive when they're together, what she thinks their life might be like. She wants that. She thinks they can have it.
She turns over, but it takes a long time for her to fall asleep, torn between excitement at the thought of seeing him again tomorrow and fear and nerves – what if he doesn't want her? What if she's too much of a physical being for him? What if –
She could do this all night if she lets herself.
Determinedly she closes her eyes and counts shades of green until she falls asleep.
———
She lets herself into her studio the next morning, her heart in her throat and her body alive with nervous tension singing through her blood. Solas is there, of course, curled up in the window with one of her sketchpads. He looks up when she comes in and gifts her that slow, gentle smile. Despite her nerves, she has to smile back.
How had she missed it? Now that she's paying attention, she quite simply aches to feel the length of his long, lean body against hers, his hands in her hair, laughing in the bright morning light from her window –
"Are you all right?" he asks. "You left so quickly last night. I was concerned."
"Oh, right – " She laughs. "I'm fine, I promise."
He tilts his head. "Are you certain? You seem to be – "
"I did want to talk to you!" She interrupts him before he can finish that particular thought, because if he calls her nervous or anything like it, she thinks she might actually lose the ability to speak.
Solas sets the sketchpad down on his knee and gives her his full attention. "Of course," he says, his eyes pale from the brightness of the morning and difficult to read. He seems like he's on his guard.
She takes a deep breath, trying to remember the things she'd wanted to say last night, all the clever phrasing she'd thought up on her way here. Everything seems to have flown clean out of her head. He's looking at her closer than ever, and it makes her nervous. Maybe she should just begin at the beginning? "I... I have feelings for you. Um." She swallows, belatedly aware that she's twisting her fingers through each other. "Non-platonic feelings of – Romantic feelings, that is to say, that I don't know if you could ever – " And then her mind tumbles along faster than her words. She's red as a beet now, all the way up to her hairline, and radiating heat like a live wire. "Not that I expect anything from you, of course!" she rushes to assure him, because she couldn't bear it if he felt like that from something she said – or – or didn't say – Although at this rate there isn't going to be anything she hasn't said.
Solas is just staring at her, possibly because she's lost her fucking mind.
Oh, creators, she is a mess.
El scrubs her hands roughly over her face, dying a little inside. Fuck it. "I'm in love with you," she says, sighs, and drops her hands to look at him, pale and still, like he's some kind of statue she's only been imagining into life, like this is all a Pygmalion story with an unhappy ending.
She doesn't expect him to get up and come over to her, taking her hands in his. "Ellana," he says, soft and kind, and that's really all he needs to say. She knows the voice people use to let someone down gently. She's used it herself.
No matter that her heart is sinking down into her boots, the sick curl of shame and helpless, unhappy misery threatening to replace it already working their way through her limbs toward the core of her; he's not interested and that's the end of it. She needs to – She wants to go lick her wounds, though, and she thinks that's a fair thing to want right now.
El pulls her hands out of his, or she tries to, but his grip turns tight and unyielding.
"Many who discover us feel this way," Solas says, his eyes so damned kind and understanding and strangely remote, like he's keeping them separate, in their accustomed places, with an invisible line between them marked do not cross. "If you truly search your feelings, I think you'll find that they stem from infatuation. As I said, it's a heady thing to be inspired. I'm honored, certainly, but – "
If he says one more word, she's going to scream.
"Stop there," she says, a slow, creeping flush of rage working through her from her toes to her crown. At least he does stop. El glares at him. "You think I'm in love with you because I'm grateful to you?"
She yanks her hands out of his because she can't – because she has to move or she'll explode, strides over to her wall of still-wet paintings and slaps the wall next to the first one she'd ever done of him.
"Have you looked at this?" she snaps, turning just her head to narrow her eyes at him. "And I mean really looked at it? And this, and this one, and this one – " El points to each painting in turn, all of the ones she's ever done of him. Solas stands where she'd left him, his hands behind his back, listening to her with quiet and grave courtesy. He's being polite and it makes her want to scream. "Are you really telling me..."
She can't believe that he could have missed it. Not him. Not when he quite literally got to know her through her art.
"I don't believe that you couldn't tell that I wanted you," she says. And if he didn't, it's because he didn't want to know, and none of the reasons she can think of for that make this any easier to swallow.
"Desire and love are not the same thing, Ellana." He sounds so remote, Solas does, and even as she reacts to that, her scalp fair tingling with rage, she wonders why. He's never been like this with her.
"I'm not a child, Solas," she says, her own voice chilly. "I know the difference. And I wish you would stop telling me what I feel."
He inclines his head. "My apologies."
So cold he is that she feels the chill of winter in the blow he strikes. It's like – like they'd never sat in the sun from her window, putting their heads together over her charcoal-and-ink sketches or his oil pastels, discussing technique, their lines and framing; like she hadn't spent hours with her hands in her paints and his voice in her ear, talking about history and all the things he'd seen and experienced, this miracle man of hers; like she means nothing to him. Like she's nothing. And that hurt is overwhelming, a sudden, unexpected wave that turns her upside down and steals the breath from her body.
"Why are you doing this!" El cries. "All you have to do is say no, that you don't want me, and I would let this go in a heartbeat."
And it's then, as he stares at her in the electric silence that follows her words, as he stands there, staring at her like a statue, like a prey animal that's been caught out of cover – it's then that she finally understands.
"But you can't, can you," she says, so slowly, because she can't quite believe this is real. "You can't say that because it's not true."
"I have never lied to you," Solas says, his eyes narrowed at her, his voice just starting to heat from beneath, like a dormant volcano shrugging off millennia of old magma in preparation to explode.
"Oh, creators, please – " El stops, covering her face with her hands, emotionally reeling. He wants her, but he doesn't want to – or thinks he shouldn't, or any of a million other things, but all of them add up to the fact that this is a bad idea and she should stop, backtrack, somehow get them back on the easy footing they'd had before.
If that's possible. They've both said things they can't take back.
To accept the scorched remnants of their friendship, or to take a chance and try to forge something new...
"Then tell me the truth," she says, dropping her hands to look at him. She catches him watching her, and in his eyes she sees so many things, so many complicated emotions moving so fast that she only catches a few: resignation, determination, weariness.
She doesn't want him to feel like that because of her. That is the opposite of the point.
"Please," she whispers.
She waits for him to speak for a long time while the shadows chase each other across his face, his eyes slowly, reluctantly warming from steel to one of her favorite moody, muted blues. His mouth likewise softens. "If I could watch your mind work for a thousand years I doubt I would ever come to understand you," he says with a small, wry smile. "I never expected this. And I have reacted... poorly."
That's an understatement, she thinks, but saying it out loud seems counterproductive.
Solas crosses to her, slowly, like he's giving her the chance to move away or put something between them. He slows to a stop six inches in front of her; he's only a little taller than she is, but she feels his closeness all up and down her nerves like a live wire.
"I am sorry," he says. This time she believes him.
But he's not done.
"What I might or might not want is immaterial." He takes her hands again, and she lets him, because even though he's turning her down again and she's caught in the undertow, the swelling anticipation of pain, she still wants to feel him. "Ellana, I am not real. We are fundamentally different. That does not mend."
"Maybe you don't have a body," she says, frowning. "That doesn't make you not real."
He looks at her hands in his, and so does she. He doesn't feel any different than anyone else.
"And it certainly doesn't make you any less of a person." The fucking idea of it, that he thinks that of himself, makes her so angry that she could spit, and sad again, too. Has this really been what he's feeling this whole time? His whole life? He's watching her, his eyes unreadable, and –
She looks up at him. "What you want is just as important as what I want. To me it's more important."
And if it's not her – She doesn't want to argue her way into a relationship. That feels like harassment to her, and cheap besides. She wants him to choose her, in the same way that she's chosen him.
He looks away, and her heart breaks again, thinking that he's turning away from her, that after everything she's said he still can't look at her that way – but then he chuckles, a rueful little thing, pulls her flush against him and kisses her.
Everything drops away, all of her senses deserting her at once so she's only left with the feeling of his mouth on hers – yes, finally, yes –
She's already smiling at him when he pulls away.
"You'll regret this, in the end," he warns her, but his arm is still around her, like he refuses to let her go.
"Worth it," El says, soft, letting her fingers trail down his face. She smiles at him, huge and happy; she tugs him down again for another kiss, and they stand there, in the morning light from her studio windows, wrapped up in each other as the whole world passes by outside.