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He’d thought her frail, that first, fateful day, her pulse a weak push against his fingers and her breath the ragged lament of the dying. He’d changed his mind two days later, discovering an unexpected defiance in her perseverance, shoving back against the fate that had deemed it fit to befall her.
She is not frail, Solas knows. No rabbit for a hunter’s trap, though she dances between iron teeth, unmindful of the danger that lurks in the tall grass. Or, not unmindful, exactly. The word is hard to place. Unconcerned? Or is her cheerful ignorance a challenge?
“Hahren.”
The mountain air is cold, brittle with frost, and when he sucks a breath through his nose he feels the sting – a welcome distraction from the lilt of her voice, curving around the tip of his ear. Hahren, she says, and he can never tell if she means it in jest. He’s always considered himself perceptive, a keen nose for mockery, and woe to those who speak his name lightly.
“You’re pensive today.”
The smile, he finds, comes easy. “I am always pensive.”
She snorts, kicks her legs against the balustrade on which she’s perched. A child, in so many ways, her joys simple and many, though there are years in the crow’s feet by her eyes, the veins of silver in her hair.
“More than usual,” she elaborates, with a glibness he’d once thought the bane of all mortals, but there is a part of him, a young and reckless spark of old that enjoys her shameless candour.
The tilt of her head pretends at innocence, even when he can tell where she’s headed. “What’s on your mind?”
You, he thinks, and knows that’s what she desires to hear, by the way her mouth curves. And he feels like laughing – a credit to her strange being, for luring mirth from an old heart.
“You revel in this,” he says instead, to which he receives a hum, low and soft from deep in her breast.
“I’m allowed a bit of revelry, I think,” Ellana counters, eyes crinkling at the corners. The sight steals his gaze, as all things do that bring to mind her mortality, wondrous and unpredictable as it is. “I just spent an hour with bickering diplomats up to my ears. I felt the need of a…change of scenery.” She grins, and – winks. Solas is tempted to ask if she’s been spending too much time with Varric, but finds himself siezed by an entirely different impulse.
“And is it a pleasing change?”
The upwards climb of her brows lures another smile, and he feels – glad, that there is yet hope to catch her off guard.
Hands pushing against the hard stone, she slides off the balustrade, landing with graceful ease beside him. And her surprise is gone now, replaced with a calculating expression he knows, though her face reveals nothing of her thoughts.
“Are you teasing, Solas?”
He tilts his head. “You speak as though that’s not what you are doing, vhenan.” The word rolls of his tongue with an ease he no longer questions, though he doubts the wisdom behind it. He’s courted danger by speaking it once – courted her, though there is not much difference between the two, he finds.
Her laugh is a sound befitting a much larger person – the Iron Bull’s influence, perhaps. She did not laugh like that when they first met, the furrow of her brow a grave thing as she’d fumbled through her first, hesitant steps into the new role assigned to her by providence.
A step towards him, and she does not fumble. And once more it is an innocent gesture, but for the fact that it’s everything but.
Ellana looks at him – looks, and sees. Not everything, never that, for she is mortal still, sight too clouded to see the truth at her fingertips. But she sees more than enough.
“But are your intentions the same as mine, I wonder?” she muses, and he hears the defeat in her words – the quiet surrender of one who has hoped, and relented. There’s been no repeat of their last kiss, though she’s made no secret of her desires. And he’s too old for this, he thinks. These laden remarks. This woefully mortal dance. But he recognizes the spark of defiance within him and he knows it as her own influence. And he knows that whatever she thinks, he is not unaffected.
“I don’t know. You would have to tell me yours.”
Surprise again, the barest flicker. But she’s wary now, attempting to gauge the reason behind his sudden boldness. He does not always indulge her – flirtatious prodding. He has kissed her twice – the first a dream-kiss due mostly her own daring, but the second…
This balcony is not the same. The view is not as grand; the air colder, harder in his nose. But her cheeks are flushed like they were, and her eyes are full of that uncanny brightness that pulls and pulls.
It will be kinder in the long run, and he knows the words and the warning well, but speaking them takes more effort with every passing day in her company. He has always trusted his judgement, his own good sense, but the soft touch against his arm stills the ever-churning tide of his thoughts, and when she inclines her head there seems no better decision than this – than her.
“I’m giving you time to run, you know,” she says then, voice tinged with a humour that tries to mask the disappointment that lurks beneath. It’s what she expects him to do – to tuck his tail between his legs and bolt. Does she think him the rabbit, Solas wonders?
And – there is that spark of defiance again. A need to prove her wrong – to show her the extent of what he feels, the sheer magnitude of it all, pushing past his better judgement, to seep between the cracks left by her smiles, her gentle wisdom.
“I am not running.”
The words are raw things, and his voice is one he does not recognize – or, one he does, but it’s an old voice, forgotten through the course of long years. A part of him carefully contained by a veneer of calm he has taken such pride in maintaining. A feeble defence against the fullness of her being.
She’s still touching him, and when she steps closer there’s assurance in the set of her jaw, the tilt of her chin. He slides questing fingers against the sharp curve, along the jut of her ear, before burying his grip in the mass of her hair. It’s more than she should allow him, an intimacy his reluctance does not deserve, surely.
“You know, this has to be the longest prelude to a kiss I’ve ever seen,” comes the quip then, and he feels her laughter in his chest. “I’m starting to wonder if you’re actually going to–”
He tastes her laughter now, steals her words and her lethal wit, and when he tugs her closer, tucking soft curves against him and pulling at her hair with far less care than he’s shown her before, he feels–
He feels.
Ellana breathes, the vibrant warmth of her life against his mouth, and when a noise slips through the press of their lips, a sonorous moan that drops straight to his stomach, Solas thinks himself lost. Her hands are quick and devilish things, fisting in his tunic with enough fervour that he has to swallow his own groan where it rises in his throat. Pliant, she bends beneath his touch, pushing closer until there’s no more space to cover. No – not frail, he thinks, the hand not tangled in her hair following the dip of her waist; the solid strength of her shape beneath the fabric of her jacket. The scrape of his fingers against the back of her scalp yields a sigh, a pleased shudder that makes his hands twitch.
There’s a tug at his belt then, and he feels her smile in her kiss.
“Come,” she murmurs, the word spoken around his lower lip, caught in her teeth. Not a question now, he notes.
Drawing back, she shows her intent, lays it bare in the naked expression on her face, her cheeks flushed from more than just the cold. When she moves next her hands skim along his hips, giving a small tug at his tunic.
She doesn’t repeat herself, but the word sits, a clear writ in the fine-drawn lines of her face.
The curl of his fingers around her wrist finds the leap of her pulse, lively and strong, and when she moves he gives his answer by following. Perhaps it is not too much, to allow himself this brief respite of happiness. There will yet be time to run, he thinks, though his conviction sounds more like fool’s hope with every gasp of her breath, and the pleasure of her laugh that falls against his throat. He holds her with more caution than necessary, fingers skirting the arch of her spine with the care he’s seen her own slide along the curve of her bow. And his name is a dark spell on her lips, a different magic than the one lurking beneath her skin.
There will yet be time to run, Wolf.
But when he buries himself within her, the ultimate surrender, Solas wonders if there is any truth at all to his resolve.