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“Neve. Neve!”
Neve started slightly - well, that was rare, she didn’t surprise easily - and looked up from her notes to glare at Lace Harding. “What?” She asked, voice only slightly cold.
”Have you slept - I mean really slept? At all? Since…”
There was no need to finish that sentence. How could she? Since Bellara had been taken? Since Davrin and Assan had been killed? Since Rook had vanished? Since Minrathous had fallen silent?
Since her heart had broken into a million jagged pieces, only to be stomped on for good measure?
”I’m fine,” Neve said. They both knew it was a lie. Neve knew they both knew it was a lie.
They were all openly lying to each other these days. Pretending to be whole, while they were shattered. Filling the voids left by Bellara, by Davrin and Assan…
By Rook.
Harding looked at her evenly, as though measuring the extent of her lie. “You need to rest,” she disagreed.
”I can rest later. There’s too much to do.” Neve looked back down at her notes and continued writing.
”He wouldn’t want you to-“
“Don’t.”
Tense silence reigned for several minutes as Lace tried to decide on a new tactic and Neve pretended that she was absorbed in her work.
Her work. What a joke. She had no special knowledge of the veil and the Fade; fortunately Emmrich did, but so far even he had no solution. Worse, other than getting designs to Kal-Sharok to see if a new dagger could be lyrium-made, there was little Neve could do to help.
But she couldn’t stop. She needed to finish this job.
For him.
“Can we…take a walk?” Lace finally asked. “Just for a bit? Clear our heads a little?”
Neve wanted to say no, to keep bashing against the wall in her mind and force it to give way to some insight. But she’d been there before, and she knew what the answer should be even if it frustrated her.
“Alright.” She stood, knees popping once or twice. A testament to how long she’d been seated without moving.
It took only minutes of walking around the Lighthouse grounds to remind Neve why she had not done this more often. Every place was a reminder. The walkway to Bellara’s now silent workshop. Assan’s favorite sunning spot. Davrin’s preferred chair at the table.
And Rook…he was everywhere, even as he was no where. Neve expected him to round the corner, and felt herself break just the smallest bit more when he never did.
She needed a change in focus, not to dwell.
“Coin for your thoughts?” She asked Lace. Harding gave her a long look. Neve smiled slightly and shrugged her shoulders. Hypocrisy? Maybe. But she would do what they needed to see this through, and what they needed was to not fracture entirely.
They wound their way to the library balcony before Lace took a seat, dangling her feet over the ledge. Neve sat next to her, looking over the grounds that now felt far too empty.
“You know we’re here for you too, right?” Lace finally said. “You keep asking how we are, offering help, but…we’re a team. We want to do that for you, too.”
And they had tried. Lace and Taash had hovered around like protective escorts whenever they’d gone somewhere together. Lucanis had taken over all cooking and beverage duties; he’d been making Neve’s favorites. Emmrich had been busiest, since their best guess (educated guess, sure, but more of a hunch than a fact) was that Rook was in the Fade, but he’d sent Manfred after her to check in more than once.
The first time, Manfred asked where Rook was. She’d gently pushed him out the door before she’d collapsed against it and quietly broken down.
“I can’t think about ‘after’ and you.”
Well, the tables had turned; ‘after’ seemed to be here, and she still couldn’t think about it. Not really. Not if she was going to finish this job, and she had to finish this job.
“I know. And I’m grateful,” Neve said. And she was, even if she was utterly incapable of accepting their offers. She knew they were there, and it was…comforting.
Nevertheless, “but I need to finish this. I…” She had to pause and take a breath to regain her equilibrium. “I have to finish this job.”
For him, remained unsaid.
“But you don’t have to finish it alone.” The words hung there, and Neve could nearly feel Lace begging her to pick them up and move forward with them.
But Neve could do this. She had to.
“Have you heard from Kal-Sharok?” She asked, leaving Lace’s offer dangling. Harding’s lips thinned in barely concealed frustration, but she nodded.
“Tomorrow.” She told Neve. Tomorrow.
Neve tried not to get her hopes up that it would work, but she couldn’t help the little glimmer of it. “I’ll go with you,” she said. Better to be there herself, to see if it could cut through the fade’s enchantments. To see if that little voice of hope Rook had sneakily pushed into her heart was right--good things happen, Neve--or if her brain would win the day again. “We should bring Emmrich, too.”
Lace nodded. After a moment, she stood and offered Neve a hand up. “Come on. Lucanis is making something with bread and cheese, and then we can plan for tomorrow.”
Neve took the proffer, Lace squeezing her hand gently. The tight, small smile Neve gave her in response was genuine. They were both trying. They all were.
“I will be down in a few minutes then.”
Lace nodded and walked downstairs and inside, to get Taash no doubt. Neve waited a few minutes before following.
If the Lighthouse grounds felt unnaturally empty these days, the Lighthouse itself was worse. Rook had filled up any space he occupied, bad jokes, ridiculous stories, positive affirmations, and somehow endless activity. She could probably count on her fingers the number of times she’d seen him hold still. On one hand, if she took out the times it was because of a job. Without his presence, the air was still and foreign.
Neve scanned the shelves for a book she’d been meaning to read this morning, old Tevinter theories on Elven magic. She’d seen it on the shelves what felt like a lifetime ago, but couldn’t help the way her gaze kept shifting to the door.
To his door. Like a part of her was just waiting for him to throw it open and come in.
She shook herself out of her reverie. The book was here, though. Emmrich had finished it ages ago, and he and Bellara had been comparing ideas at dinner before they’d gone to…
Before, anyway.
Neve’s stomach turned. She had a hunch.
With no small amount of trepidation, she went upstairs to the heavy doors that separated Rook’s little sanctuary from the rest of his daily madness. A room none of them had entered, so far as she knew, since…before.
Standing at Rook’s door felt like waiting on the top of a cliff and trying to talk herself into jumping off. She had no idea how she’d land, at the bottom. Neve took a shaky breath.
If she’d learned nothing else from Rook, it was that sometimes she had to leap. Neve pushed the doors open.
The metallic clang as the doors opened bounced off the walls in a mocking cacophony, a reminder that the room was far too empty. It was just as he’d left it. It was sparsely decorated, a hold over from growing up in a disciplined military family perhaps, or simply evidence that he spent much of his time elsewhere. He wasn’t naturally neat. Some of his papers and a stack of books sat on a small side table by the couch, almost as disheveled as those on her own desk. His civilian clothes lay in a heap on the floor. Of course.
She wasn’t sure if the sound she made was laughter or the beginning of a sob.
Neve sat on the couch, carefully, almost reverently, and picked up the pile of books and loose papers. She shuffled through the stack; old habits died hard. Notes on strategy. A collection of information they had gathered about Solas. (Oh, he would pay. If Neve didn’t get to him first, she’d heard Taash musing on whether the Dread Wolf could melt.)
Drawings. He’d been drawing. She supposed, even in here, he’d needed something to provide a physical outlet. Taash. Lace. Varric. Assan. Davrin. Weisshaupt. Manfred…he’d drawn all of them. Even the enigmatic Caretaker. At the bottom of the collection, she found several of her.
The first time he’d met her in Minrathous (the demons on the edges were an interesting touch). Her at her desk, wisps around her. And one of her face, just…smiling.
Neve took several sharp breaths and wiped her eyes before putting the drawings aside. It was too much. She picked up the book she’d been looking for and just held it for a moment, breathing. She couldn’t break, not yet. The job wasn’t done.
As she stood, she bent to pick up his pile of clothes. They were cold.
She couldn’t have said why that did it.
Neve sank back onto the sofa and held them to her face as she cried. She was tearing apart from the inside, and Maker, she never should have come in here. His shirt was soft, and smelled of him, and…
Was cold. Empty. Wrong. Like everything was.
She let her tears fall into the soft, dark fabric until she was able to breathe again.
“Just find a way out, Trouble. Can you do that? Please?” Neve knew she sounded desperate. She was desperate.
“You know I’ll try.”
She should have told him, before they’d gone. Hadn’t. Neve had replayed that conversation in her head a hundred times since the island. A litany of her own fears, damning. She had been so afraid she wouldn’t be able to tell him later that she hadn’t told him at all.
She would tell him when he got back. He would try, but she would too.
Lace’s words flashed in her mind. They all would try.
Neve glanced around and, spotting an empty pack, pushed the book and the shirt into it to take with her. Then she closed the doors and headed downstairs.
She would finish this job. She had to.