Chapter Text
He’s given his heart to many things – a cause, a people, a past. And he’s lost it to even more still; the love of a woman with the world in her palm, and her cause, her people and her future. But in his long life, nothing has gripped his heart with quite the same fervour as the pair of hands he holds between his own now; plump little fingers cupped around the heat of a small flame.
“Focus.”
Lower lip tucked firmly between her teeth, she heaves a breath – a terribly grave and serious thing that makes it hard not to smile, but she has her gaze fixed firmly on the flame between her palms, and pays no mind to his amusement.
Footsteps behind him, and the trail of fingers along his neck. He feels her familiar warmth against his side, and the tender lilt of her voice, a tremor in his chest. “I see you’ve moved a safe distance from the cottage. How is she getting on?”
The spark of a smile prompted by her mother’s appearance makes the flame flicker and grow, and her delight is quick to follow. “Mamae, look!”
Ellana’s own smile is fond, if not touched with a small amount of droll humour. “Clever girl, though I hope you’re not trying to beguile me with your charms in order to distract me from the fact that it’s long past your bedtime?” She offers Solas a look. “I wonder where she gets that from.”
“I fail to see the comparison,” he counters smoothly, cupping his hands over those in his grip, trapping the flame. Startled, Sage makes to pull her hands back–
“Da’vhenan,” he says, calmly. “It will only burn you if you let it.”
The expression that greets him when she lifts her eyes is one of understanding, heavy and severe in the way of children, but the small, trembling nod betrays her front of bravery. But she doesn’t pull her hands from his, and Solas sees some of the tension bleed out of her shoulders with her next breath.
When he opens his hands the flame is gone, and her disappointment escapes in a small noise.
He looks up at his wife, observing their interaction with interest. “We could give her one more hour?”
Ellana’s smile turns wry, and he sees the tiredness that sits in her eyes. “I thought we were keeping proper hours in this house. She’s not being raised by wolves.” At his look, she laughs. “No? I thought it was funny.” Then with a grin, she makes to reach for her daughter, nimble and quick despite her lacking appendage and the size of her stomach, and stifling elated shrieks with a peppering of kisses against round, freckled cheeks as she hoists her onto her hip. “Come on now, you wild thing. It’s time to get you into bed.”
A small pat against her shoulder, and “Mamae,” Sage murmurs, then – something against Ellana’s ear, the words too low for Solas to catch where he sits.
“You’d rather have Papae tuck you in? What, is my rendition of The Little Nug That Could not heartfelt enough?”
A long moment passes – the pause of one who does not wish to offend, though Solas doubts she could if she tried. And, “Counts freckles,” Sage says at length, mumbling the words into her mother’s collar.
Ellana’s look is one of long-suffering sparked with fondness. “Papae counts your freckles?” Then with a softly laughing sigh, “Well, I suppose it’s good to keep track of them. I know how elusive freckles can be.” She looks at Solas, but there’s no insult to be found in her expression.
Rising to his feet, it’s to place a kiss against her forehead. “You could join us,” he speaks the words against her brow, smile curving. “I find your reading quite impassioned.”
That earns him a snort. “You’ll regret saying that two passages in, when I start doing the different voices.” A glance at the girl on her hip, as though to ask for confirmation, but it’s to find her half asleep, nose tucked against her throat. “Although it looks like there won’t be much need of either freckle-counting or reading tonight.” But she’s handing her over even as she speaks the words, and he takes the burden from her arms, watching with a frown the grimace that crosses her face, before she presses her knuckles into the small of her back.
Small hands curl in his tunic as a sleepy mumble falls against his neck, and he allows Sage’s weight to rest on his arm. “You should not tax yourself.”
Ellana waves him off. “It’s just back pains.”
“Even so, the burden–”
She meets his objection with a smile that stops the words on his tongue. “It’s the easiest burden I’ve ever carried,” she says, with a touch against his arm, before tucking a curling lock of red hair behind a pointed ear, a desperate affection in the brightness of her eyes. “Well, maybe the second easiest. For some reason I’m so much larger now than when I was this far along with Sage.”
He wonders if he should remark on the observation, a suspicion he’s carried for a while but not yet shared, but he isn’t given the chance when she looks towards him, with a smile that’s for him alone. “Come on. You can put her to bed, and then I can tuck you in.”
The raised brow only prompts her smile to stretch even wider. “Something tells me it is not quite a bedtime story you have in mind,” Solas chuckles.
Her laughter is a sudden burst of sound – the loudest found in their quiet home, at least for another few months, and it reminds him that he’s split his heart two ways. Three ways, soon, or even four, if his suspicions are correct. He’s had more to give than he’d ever thought possible, but then she’d made it her mission to prove him wrong, in this as in anything.
“Some days I wish she’d stay this age forever,” Ellana says as they set off towards the cottage, the evening’s gentle dark a welcome embrace and the lights of their small home winking in the distance.
Against his shoulder, Sage slumbers, the smell of woodsmoke and the wild forest in the hair curling beneath his chin. “Everything changes,” Solas counters. “You cannot stop growth.”
“You know, I think I’ve heard those words before,” she says, with mischief in her smile. “Must have been a very wise person who spoke them.”
He meets her smile with stark honesty. “The wisest I have ever known.”
Her laughter is nothing more than a startled breath now, and he takes some pleasure in the fact that he can still catch her off guard. But she’s quick to recover, and, “Flattery like that will definitely get you more than a bedtime story,” she says, stepping across the threshold, though there’s more to the words than their lightness suggests, but then this has always been their way.
They put their daughter to bed in silence, a familiar routine in the way they move around each other, tucking small feet beneath the soft wool blanket, and making sure the mage-light is lit. Solas touches a fingertip to the ward on the windowsill, and Ellana excuses herself to use the privy with a sigh weary with familiarity.
He’s halfway to the door when the small voice drifts towards him from the bed.
“Forgot to count,” Sage says, the words a drowsy tumble of syllables, but he catches their meaning well enough.
Solas settles against the mattress, watching the bleary blinking of her eyes as she tries to keep them open. And if her guile is his then her stubbornness is all her mother’s.
“One,” he says, with a touch against a pert nose, wrinkling with dissatisfaction.
“With kisses.”
His laughter is a huff, but not of irritation. And, “Two,” he speaks against her brow, to a small giggle he feels in his bones, light and sleep-spelled where it falls against his ear. And she’s fast asleep before he’s gotten to ten, but he spends a moment in the silence, counting quietly in his mind until he’s made it to fifteen, twenty, and wonders how many will fade with age (twenty-five, thirty). How many will there be to count when she’s grown past his knee – past his waist? (forty, forty-five, and that small cluster by her ear)
“Solas?”
He doesn’t look up to see Ellana in the doorway, his gaze still held by the shape on the bed; those incomprehensibly small breaths deep and heavy with sleep. And she doesn’t come to stand beside him, or take his hand to whisk him away.
“Whenever you’re ready,” is all she says, and he hears the shuffle of her feet as she leaves; the tell-tale, uneven gait prompted by her added weight. She doesn’t wait for him to respond, though he suspects she already knows the words that sit on his tongue now – that he’ll never be ready, not truly, but it’s not with sadness he considers the thought but something fiercer; a deep-rooted knowledge that ready or not, he will not waste the future – this future, dear and bright and freckled-cheeked – by looking back.