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It was four thirty-five in the morning when Bellara woke and threw up over the side of her bed. It was brackish, sticking to her tongue and teeth as a layer of sticky slime. The blue from the aquarium turned it black and glistening like lantern oil when it mixed with a puddle. Parts of her body she didn’t even know she had ached, and there was a heavy kind of phlegm buried deep in her chest that sat in her stomach.
Fish swam slowly, circling each other lazily like wolves playing with a terrified halla. She watched them, thoughts working uphill against a flood of molasses.
This… wasn’t her room. Her room was full of light and dust motes that never seemed to actually land. It had gold and brass hanging from the ceiling.
Instead, there was a pot in the corner full of blue and white flowers with the griffon insignia of the Grey Wardens painted across the front. Candles lined the floor, dripping white wax and casting amber light along the porcelain crow mask, a little wooden box stained with colorful fingerprints, and the rectangular shape of a framed canvas covered by a sheet.
She blinked slowly. Her skin felt too tight, too warm. An arm flexed against her stomach and—
Bellara gagged. Every muscle in her chest tightened around her ribs as though they were trying to squeeze every bone and organ out of her throat.
Fingers tapped against her wrist.
Bellara flinched away. The feeling buzzed against her skin. Too tight, too busy, too hot, too much. The hand retracted, and the cushion beneath Bellara shifted.
Sujihiki climbed awkwardly along the edge of the futon, looking like some short-limbed, gangly spider. Her face was bare. Bellara didn’t know why that detail was what she focused on. In the year they had known each other, she had seen Sujihiki without her mask a few times. Generally, at meals they all sat down and ate together.
It was very counterintuitive for someone to try to eat with something blocking the whole lower half of their face.
Sujihiki paused as she saw the black, briny mess on the floor. Her brow furrowed, and she waved her hand, banishing the vomit with a swarm of purple sparks that smelled of safflower oil and freshly turned, damp dirt. There was a bandage around the top of her left ear. It was white. New.
Bellara had woken up from that nightmare of red only to find wide, dark eyes staring down at her over a familiar but cracked mask. The scarlet light of the eclipse hadn’t hidden the gash through Sujihiki’s ear, nor the blood splattered in purple hair and across Bellara’s hands.
An instinctual part of Bellara urged her to touch. Soothe it. Apologize again and again. She had failed in a way. Another victim fallen prey to the god’s schemes. Who was she to have judged the mayor of D’Meta’s Crossing when she was foolish enough to succumb to the same fate?
“I—” The words burned against her tongue, felt heavy against her teeth. Bellara wanted to say them. Needed to say them.
A hand reached out and took her own. She watched the fingers weave between her own. Sujihiki’s nails were carefully trimmed, and little, pale scars dotted her knuckles.
Her arm jerked forward. Not hard enough to harm, just to yank her out of her spiraling thoughts. Sujihiki was motioning with one hand, fingers moving too fast. The light was too dim, the shadows too long, and Bellara tried to pull away.
“I don’t—”
Sujihiki whistled out two low notes. The Veil Jumper signals to wait.
Bellara paused and blinked as her body responded before her thoughts actually caught up. “Suji—”
‘Please,’ Sujihiki signed, her motions slower. Careful. ‘Okay?’
“I—I don’t understand.” It could have meant anything. “I’m fine with waiting—”
Sujihiki’s hair was already mostly undone, but her bangs fell across her face as she shook her head. Her fingers shaped slowly, spelling out every word. ‘Are you okay?’
Bellara looked away. Her gaze landed on the painting in the corner, covered up by that bit of cloth. She could see smears of green peeking out beneath the corner of the cover and wondered if it was the picture Sujihiki had been working on a few weeks ago in the Necropolis while waiting for Emmrich to finish speaking with Myrna about his… operation.
A tap against her wrist brought her attention back to the elf kneeling on the floor. Bellara swallowed. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
Sujihiki searched her face, black eyes flickering in the dark. Bellara wondered what she was looking for. A sign of the blight returning? An image of the monster that had tried to hold them back? A hypocrite? A failure? A—
It was a gentle tug that urged Bellara to her feet. Cold stone sent a shock through her feet and calves, shooing away some of the lethargy that still tried to cling to her thoughts. Adjusting the shirt Sujihiki had allowed her to borrow—well, it was probably meant to be a shorter nightgown, but the other woman was so short that the hem of it came down to the middle of Bellara’s thighs—Bellara followed the other woman through the heavy self-opening door, down the stairway, across the foyer of the library, and out into the open fade.
The red sky was gone, replaced by something not quite blue, not quite pink, and not quite yellow. Behind them, gears groaned and creaked as the Lighthouse slowly rotated.
Sujihiki guided her through the roots, up the half-crumbling staircase, and past Assan’s little nest of knickknacks and things he’d stolen from the other inhabitants. He wasn’t there at the moment and was probably either curled up in some high alcove or—more likely—was snuggled into either Davrin’s bed or armchair.
The rest of the Lighthouse was equally silent. If it ever got dark, perhaps the quiet wouldn’t be so eerie. As it was, Bellara could only look around and imagine the structure in the early days when it was still crumbling and desolate. Back when it was more of a ruin than a home.
They stepped onto the wooden stairs leading up to Davrin’s room, and Bellara was struck by their state of undress. Her in Sujihiki’s nightgown turned nightshirt and Sujihiki in a short robe with a hastily tied sash. It wasn’t unusual for people—other than Emmrich—to roam around in their sleep clothes. If they had sleep clothes. Bellara generally tried to put on pants first.
“Um—”
Sujihiki slammed her palm against Davrin’s door. It banged with a dull echo, and Bellara heard a startled, agitated squawk on the other side. Something small and wooden clattered to the floor as scrambling talons scraped loudly against stone. Another thing rattled with a hollow clunk, and the sound of grumbled cursing snuck under the door.
It opened with a rush of pleasantly warm air, and there was Davrin in his loose white v-neck shirt, trousers, and knee jutting forward to stop Assan from immediately plowing over the two women in greeting.
“Good morning,” he said, voice still thick with sleep. There were fabric marks along his cheek from his pillow, and a fire crackled in the hearth.
Assan warbled at his feet, eyes wide and bright and completely awake as though he had simply been waiting for something to urge him to spring into action. The dust from the fallen juggernaut had been washed from his feathers, and Bellara opened her mouth to ask how, exactly, Davrin had managed that when Sujihiki dropped her hand.
Cold settled in Bellara’s gut. She reached out and stopped herself just in time to see fingers flutter and swirl. They jerked, frantic and jagged.
Davrin blinked and glanced at Bellara with a matching expression of incomprehension. He stepped to the side. “Why don’t you come in?”
Sujihiki ducked past him and stood among the carved bears, griffons, and nugs. Assan followed at her heels, chirping and pressing close enough that Bellara was surprised that there was no tripping involved.
Closing the door behind him, Davrin dragged a hand down his face and rubbed the drowsiness from his eyes. “Alright,” he said. “What’s all this about?”
Sujihiki jolted back into an explanation—still too fast. Her hands blurred as she signed her way through an explanation. Bellara caught some words like ‘sleep’ and ‘cold’, but they didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.
She shifted her weight and ducked, shoulders coming up to her ears.
“Hey, hey.” Reaching his hand out, palm first, Davrin shot Bellara a look that she didn’t catch before turning back to Sujihiki. “That’s too fast for me, Rook—”
Fingers froze mid-sign. Sujihiki stared at Davrin, then turned her wide eyes to Bellara, who could only stutter out a sheepish apology. Her bare face seemed so young in the pale light streaming through the glass terrariums and falling across her sleep-mussed hair.
Bellara saw Sujihiki’s shoulders droop, her gaze fall to the floor, as hands folded carefully back into what Lucanis had learned long ago was her ‘be seen, not heard’ posture.
And Bellara hated it.
The same thing happened months ago, back in the beginning, when there couldn’t be an explanation. When the plans relied more on their instincts than strategy. Carrying around a stack of parchment was impractical, and Sujihiki’s pre-planned cards could never cover everything. Bellara had always thought that she looked so lonely standing at the edge of the group, unable to participate and standing in that stiff, though attentive, stance. They had thought her distant, cold, and apathetic.
Then the dragons attacked; she chose Treviso, and it was as if every theory had been proven true. Neve, especially, had pulled away with a decision to keep everything strictly ‘professional’ between all of them.
But Sujihiki kept showing up anyway. In the streets of Minrathous, the halls of the Necropolis, across Rivain, along the paths of Arlathan, through Hossberg’s Wetlands. Muddied and bloodied and running towards darkspawn, Venatori, Antaam, and the Gods themselves. She wrenched them forward, unrelenting like the chess piece Varric had nicknamed her after.
There was no time to pause; no second to think. One evening she was facing a dragon with Taash, and the next morning she was fighting demons with Bellara, following the trail of Anaris.
It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t good.
Bellara still didn’t like that it had been Emmrich to suggest that they sit down and actually start to learn how to understand the hand motions. She had been busy, wracked with grief and guilt, and her brother’s return. That wasn’t an excuse, though. Not to Bellara. It had just been so easy to get distracted by… louder things.
She reached out, approaching Sujihiki before realizing what she was doing. “It’s okay!” Bellara tried to keep her tone bright. “That’s okay. We can… you—Davrin has paper—”
Davrin coughed.
Bellara glared at him over Sujihiki’s purple hair. “Davrin can get paper.”
He smiled lopsidedly and boyishly. “Sure, I can. I doubt Neve is asleep.”
“I don’t think Emmrich sleeps at all,” Bellara shot back.
Davrin paused, grinned. “Why, what a fantastic idea,” he purred and turned around with a sharp call for Assan.
The griffon shook himself out, rubbed the side of his body against Sujihiki, and took after the warden.
“Okay,” Bellara said, more to ground herself than anything. “Right. Right. It’s all fine. It’ll all be fine. We can do this.”
Sujihiki had lifted her head but had stubbornly tucked her hands under her elbows. She was watching Bellara from under her bangs.
“Do you… want to try again?”
The Sujihiki from months ago would have kept silent. Her specialty was being a weapon, after all, not a strategist.
This one—who had been wrenched out the regret prison with tear trails carved through dust and blood, who Emmrich had heard break something in the infirmary, who had screamed and screamed and screamed until her already unused voice gave out beneath the strain—picked her head up slightly and started to sign.
‘Sick. Worried.’
There was a third word that Bellara didn’t understand, so Sujihiki spelled it.
‘Blight.’
Oh. Oh. The black vomit. No wonder she had been dragged out of bed to Davrin.
“I’m alright,” Bellara said with more confidence than she should have had. There was no way to describe the sensation of being infected. How it crawled through her body and thoughts alike, how there was a song beating to the rhythm of her heart until she couldn’t figure out which was following which. “It’s… gone. Or I’m pretty sure it’s gone. I don’t… hear it anymore.”
Alarm flashed across Sujihiki’s face.
“No, no!” Bellara waved her hands. “That’s a good thing! Or I think it’s a good thing. It’s not like when I was buried in all that blight where everything was numb and distant—”
‘Don’t like that,’ Sujihiki signed. The one serious of words all of them had learned very, very quickly.
Bellara hiccupped a soft, short giggle full of relief and something that might have been tears, but no. No. There was no time for that right now, actually. Later, maybe, when she could find a quiet corner and let the events of the last few days finally catch up with her. “You’re right; that part was particularly awful. It was like… like that bubble when we first met. Except I was half in the bubble and half out of it, and everything in my body was being ripped apart and stitched back together again.”
Sujihiki’s gestures grew wider, more dramatic. ‘Don’t like that.’
Laughter burst from Bellara’s lips. “I didn’t like it either!”
‘Don’t like that. Don’t like that. Don’t—’
Reaching forward, Bellara let Sujihiki keep signing as she pulled the other woman into a sweet, fond kiss.
That was promptly broken when Davrin burst into the room with a fistful of paper in hand.
All of them froze, staring at each other, while Assan pushed his head between the warden’s knees with a curious squawk. Behind him stood Emmrich.
And Neve.
Taash. Lucanis.
With Bellara standing in the middle of the room, pant-less.
“Great,” Davrin said. “I got the paper—”
The door slammed in his face, and Bellara braced her whole weight against it. “Sorry!” She called over the shouting that followed. “I’m so sorry!”
A peel of laughter broke through it all, high and jagged, as though the voice that made it had forgotten how to make it and had to learn all over again.
Bellara stared at Sujihiki.
The other woman was leaning against Davrin’s desk, one hand braced against the wood as the other pressed against her lips as if to hold the sound back.
Which shouldn’t be allowed. Absolutely not allowed. It was lovely.
“Don’t laugh!”
Sujihiki hunched over further, shoulders shaking, and tears forming in the corners of her eyes. She was shaking her head.
Bellara wanted to kiss her. To walk out the door, even without her pants, to hoard that sound all to herself. “This is your fault!”
‘No, no, no—’ Each motion was lopsided, trembling before Sujihiki gave up, sinking to the floor as her laughter grew wheezy, then quiet from just the intensity of her joy.
It was the most magical thing Bellara had ever seen.