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"Why, Solas! You never told me you could paint. I would have paid you to paint a wall back at the estate. I'm thinking a great mural of Padfoot."
Solas pauses. Looks over his shoulder at the small human woman standing with her arms crossed, propping her shapely hip against his desk. He tilts his head at her in recognition, and then returns to his task, giving her his stiff back.
"I would gladly have accepted the offer," He replies. "Though, now that I doubt that there is an estate for you to return to, you will have to settle for a sketch of your faithful mabari."
"I missed you, too."
He says nothing.
"Merrill still misses you."
He stiffens, wanting so badly to ask all of the questions that have been plaguing him. Is she well? How are the elves in the Alienage? What did she make of the last words he said to her? Had she even been able to understand them, having been raised on the mangled Elvhen the Dalish spoke?
"I can hear you thinking."
"Why are you here, Hawke?"
"Here to see an old friend."
"Varric is just outside the door."
Hawke snorts at that, half amusement and half exasperation. Her footfalls are the almost soundless pattering of a trained rogue, like the sound of sock feet against a tiled floor.
She wraps her arms around his waist, presses her head between his shoulder blades. He doesn't turn around or return the embrace (as much as years of prolonged solitude has trained him to privately ache for physical contact), but he wilts into her hold, and allows himself this moment of weakness. Above them, he can feel Dorian's gaze practically burning into his skin, and briefly wonders what the man must be thinking, to witness him allowing a human—anyone, really—to touch him in such a way.
"She's alright, you know." She murmurs into his shirt.
"I—I see."
He touches her hand in thanks, belatedly realizing a moment later that he's marred her pale Fereldan skin with bright red paint. Hawke won't mind. Not Hawke, who is loud and obnoxious and boisterous, who is messy and proud of it, who had once dipped her thumb in paint of her own and dragged it across the bridge of her upturned nose just to be contrary.
Not Hawke, who had once trekked through an old Elven ruin just to make Merrill smile, who patiently taught Fenris his letters for hours into the night, sustained on nothing but aged Tevinter wine and determination. Not Hawke, who had watched Anders destroy half a city and allowed him live.
(Not his Hawke, who had laughed in his face when he tried to push them all away, and stubbornly slept curled on the floor of the ruin he had fled to, despite the fact that he had stonily barred her from resting within in his wards, heedless of the fact that she had no magic.)
"It is good to see you." His throat is thick from just how much he means it.
"Can't really mean that if you don't turn around to actually see me, can you?" She asks, teasing and tender all in one.
Solas pauses. Looks at her over his shoulder. Then he turns around. She smiles up at him, and their friendship is renewed.