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“I suspect you have questions.”
She glances down at the green light which has eaten most of her arm, and almost laughs through the pain. ‘You have questions’. Like it’s years ago and he’s standing outside the apothecary in Haven. Standing in the tower at Skyhold. Like she’s still lost and uncertain, and he’s still a steady voice of reason.
She’s still lost, at least.
“I’m not sure how much they matter at this point, Solas,” she admits.
He looks at her, and freezes. Stares at her in undisguised shock for a moment.
“No.”
She’s not sure what he’s denying, but it sounds like he really doesn’t want it.
Perhaps, on some level, he does care.
That’s comforting. At least she didn’t imagine all of it. At least she didn’t muster the last of her strength and trek all the way out here on the flimsiest of rumours for nothing.
“Why is it…?” he whispers, horrified.
“You sound surprised,” she notes.
“I did not intend this,” he assures her. “This should not be happening.”
She laughs at him. It jostles the bones in her arm, shakes through the hollow spaces that have opened up inside of her, makes her wince.
“Does anything ever actually go the way you plan it to, trickster?” she asks him. There have been pieces. Clues. Enough for her to start to put together a picture, though a lot of it is guesswork, too. The others are furious.
She didn’t bring them.
She doesn’t really want to spend a lot of time on the shouting and accusations and inevitable murder attempts.
Solas looks like he might have preferred a fight, though.
Tough, she thinks. I don’t know that I’ve got any more of those left in me.
The anchor surges again, then, and her thoughts blank. Crackling green and pain and dammit, dammit, not right now, can’t she at least have a few minutes more, but the spaces inside of her widen. Consume her from the inside out. Voids in her chest that make her heartbeat slow.
Will this be the time it stops?
She blinks. It passes.
Close one.
She’d fallen, but he’d caught her, it seems. He’s got one hand clamped down over her mark. Like he can hold it in, somehow. And he’s shouting.
“-you not to touch her!” he snarls, furious.
Somehow she doesn’t think he’s talking to her.
Which means there’s another person or spirit somewhere. Another witness to her fall.
Whatever it is must reply, because Solas is going off again.
“I am uninterested in technicalities, you knew what I meant! You will stop it! Now!”
“Little too late for stopping it, ma sa’lath,” she murmurs, and he stiffens as if she’d struck him.
She looks at his face. Furious and miserable.
Amazing how being at the end of a life can make even massive revelations feel petty and small. She reaches up with her good, still-mostly-working hand, manages to get it high enough to grab his collar. She’d been going for his cheek, but eh. She’ll take what she can get at this point.
“You said it was real,” she reminds him.
His face falls.
“I did,” he whispers.
“Want to take that back?” she wonders.
He shakes his head, immediately, and then stills, closing his eyes.
“No.”
“Good,” she decides. “That would be an even more depressing way to go out.”
He’s shaking. She gets one of her fingers against his neck, and he catches on then; grabs her hand and presses it to the side of his face for her.
She’s so exhausted. It’s a thankless world, it’s a brutal world, and even this, here and now, can’t be pure.
“Vhenan,” he breathes, ragged. “Ir abelas, ma vhenan.”
Amazing. That hurts almost as much as the anchor does.
“Next time you fall in love, give whoever it is a chance to love you back. Okay?” she suggests.
He lets out a strangled noise.
“No.”
“Oh come on. That was a nice sentiment. I’m trying to go out classy here,” she insists, but there is a wild look in his eyes and he’s shaking his head, again, and that fury is growing by the minute.
It’d be alarming if she wasn’t already dying.
Well, it’s still alarming, actually. That’s a ‘burn down the world’ kind of a look and as pissed off as she still is with most of Thedas, she’s been working pretty hard to keep that from happening.
“No crazy rampages. Dying wish,” she informs him, rubbing her thumb against the top of his cheek.
He stares at her with eyes like flint and storms.
“I am going to fix this,” he says, standing up.
He takes her with him. She feels dizzy for a minute, her hand falling as he lets it go so he can scoop his arm under her knees.
“No crazy rampages,” she reiterates.
“It is not a dying wish unless you are actually going to die, which you are not,” he tells her, murmuring it before he presses his lips to her forehead. He jostles her very little when he begins to walk.
Then there is light, swirling and swallowing them whole, voices whispering, something snapping back like sharp teeth to warn them away.
She closes her eyes, and they are gone.